by Karime Salame Sainz

Liselore Frowlijn is a Dutch artist with a background in fashion, cultural studies, and education. During three afternoons in March, we engaged in a conversation, where first, without seeing her work, I would start to create a “passport” of her new identity as an artist. In looking for answers, we exchanged different texts that she has been reading and studying recently. I later visited her studio and looked at her present work. I asked Liselore what these works say about the relationships we, as humans, have with objects. 

The result of these interviews is this text. A text about the accumulation of things, how our bodies and materials are interconnected, and how they all impact each other. 
After our conversations and sitting at my desk surrounded by mementoes, I can understand how objects can speak and how they teach us to find inspiration or answers to essential questions by looking at them, reading, and interacting with them. 
This text, through the work of Liselore, will inspire others to see objects as a form of creativity, albeit the traditional form of artistic expression.

Cocoons 

Art serves as a medium to grasp my complex relationship with things. So I was astonished when I realised you had the word  “hoarding” in your notes from our discussions because it’s something I tried to keep for myself; I think I’m somewhere in the spectrum.  I’m always involved and invested or distracted. You could say, “by the things that I encounter, it’s like it can happen when I’m biking on the street, when I see people on public transport, or when I go to a secondhand shop”. Is almost as if the object it’s talking to me, and I want to do something with it, give it a place in my art, like make a pedestal out of these things. For instance, the cocoons I painted here came from the place I lived for one summer in London. I stayed in a nurse’s apartment who rented her place while she was away. And she had all these magazines about Costa Rica and the jungle and pictures from the 80s in the jungle there, and there was this cool picture, and I decided to paint it also because I couldn’t let go of it, it was just a picture in a magazine, but somehow it was an encounter. 

Democratic Arrangements 

I’m trying to find a democratic way of arranging all objects I see and own like I’m creating families, almost. According to philosopher Walter Benjamin, every time he unpacked his beloved books after a move, each book triggered memories of how it came into his possession. Each item he describes is associated with a distinct provenance, a series of memories that make the books not just objects moving from box to shelf but an external representation of himself. And this representation makes a new arrangement every time. In my case, I enjoy giving the objects the space to tell their stories and putting them in a particular context where they can encounter, “proof” that everything contains a memory in which a large amount of information is contained-which can also be disclosed. Or, as Benjamin mentioned, collecting is also an act of revolt or a way to assemble a new history.

Misfits

I realised in the past few days how this new direction of work is an attempt to accept that wherever I go or whoever I meet, I often do feel like a misfit (this week, it happened again to me at an event). I push myself to go out there and try to be as honest as possible towards myself and others, but often this makes me feel like I’m a stranger to others. 
It’s important to acknowledge this great insecurity within me, and perhaps it is, in the end, mostly my ego talking ; ) Only by ‘bumping’ my skin can I ‘grow’ a thicker one.

To stretch these textiles, consider them as living objects, and portray things into beings, I try to create my own family of tactile misfits where I could belong. They give me strength and a lot of joy. Strangely enough, I sometimes gain more confidence after inter- and intra-acting with these nonhuman beings than after a conversation with humans, leaving me wondering what I might have said or done ‘wrong’. Still, my longing to live in the most honest way overcomes this fear, as I’ll always try to search for connections within the conversation with others. Ultimately, we all want to be seen and heard but must observe and listen. The latter I especially appreciate when teaching, where I’m also learning myself. 

Agency

In this world that exists out of coincidence and different layers, my sculptures can be surprised by the agency they carry. An object that makes you feel differently has agency, and I hope to bring its aliveness to the viewer, that somehow you are soaked up for a moment by the strangeness of things that come from them. When immersed briefly with this wave of colours, textures, and materials you recognize, having this encounter with something out of your comfort interests me. You haven’t considered it before, but it’s out there. It’s the abundance of materials we have as a society; people throw away things every day or not even wearing them. So there will be experience, something very familiar. To suggest that these materials are not out of value or so to stretch them in a way that shows their erotic attributes. I like to play with people’s expectations towards the mundane. Each object represents a story that, somehow or together, creates a new piece. Emphasizing traces, remnants, and signs from the past by enlarging them and showing that the present presence is only a temporary form that eventually changes into a new composition.

So to what extent an erotic power can be depicted without people…

Coincidence 

Playing with the coincidence and layering of disciplines has been going on throughout my work, I have been collaborating with artist Ignas van Rijckevorsel, first for my fashion collections, then later, it became more and more autonomous, and now we have been working on a project for my former school St. Bonifatius College. We took the motif of the snake, which is a recurring motif in Boni’s art curriculum, and together with craftsmen, we created this fragmented version of it as sculptures placed in the schoolyard for the kids to experience their own way. We are then bringing the snake to live in the digital world, so it moves in different colours, where its roots grow out of dark waters, creating a virtual dreamscape that explores the possibilities of connecting with our more-than-human nature while sitting on or playing around its colourful camouflage candies.