“I let myself be led by emotion”
When Annelien Dekker talks about her sculptures, her brown eyes start to sparkle even more than they normally do. As a child she was always busy with her hands, with the spinning wheel – “it’s still upstairs with my mother” and she made many special creations. If she had a party, she would buy some fabric on the Amsterdam Albert Cuyp market to look beautiful and slightly different in the evening than her peers. She did not do pattern drawing, the model went from her feeling. “I just managed to visualize what I wanted to make”. For ten years she lived and worked in Switzerland and was involved in other matters but talent does not deny herself.
Visualizing connections.
Back in Aalsmeer it seemed as if the past years had to be overtaken. There was time again for looking with a capital L. “Everything is about looking ….. about visualizing connections”. For Annelien this happens literally in Picture – Language, three dimensional. From the moment she started working with clay or wax, she knew: I want to continue with this.
“I cannot help but show what I mean in sculptures”.
She doesn’t do sketches, because they are in her head, as was the case with the home-made clothing. “I know to the millimetre how my sculpture should be. It always fits and I do not know how to explain it. It is my intuitive feeling.
“Making a sculpture is a total experience.”
A bronze flower faithfully made by Annelien gets, despite the static matter, through her hands so much playfulness, beauty and eloquence that it becomes, as it were, a living object. The entire process / from bud to full bloom and ten the wilting, she shows. Front and back are finished to the finest detail. “All sides must be equally beautiful”.
Sculptures
“Making a sculpture is a total experience”
That counts not only for her flowers but also for her dancing figures. With their fluttering robes they show a cheerful light-heartedness with which they invite the viewer to dance along. Her figures are born out of emotion as she herself indicates.
“Sometimes an sculpture makes itself”.
Annelien leaves nothing to chance. Except for the bronze casting – she praises herself happy with her bronze foundry – she does everything herself. The grinding and the patinating is done with the same precision as the making of the sculpture. “I love the casting skin and sometimes it shows such a beautiful color. My sculptures always have a natural color. The chemical process of patinating always keeps surprising me. I think that by doing everything myself I can add an extra dimension to my sculptures so that they touch me in my soul. Making a sculpture is a total experience for me.
