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My work is about imaginary journeys. With all my might I am searching for blissful, safe places. Where tree trunks light up, rocks are hollowed out by water, panoramic views loom up and flowers blossom. That is where I want to abide in thought, put down my stool to rest and look around, even though I know that nothing is what it seems. Often, my drawings recount my painful attempts to find the way to this place, sometimes I draw or paint the discovered place itself, rendering a view of the view.

My recent drawings are based on parts of letters of more or less well-known women acquainted with Nietzsche, which express a longing but also reveal the impossibility of like-mindedness. Superimposed on these text fragments I make drawings of places where real encounters between the correspondents could have taken place: the landscape as a witness. It becomes a search for the scope of language and drawing.

During the selection of quotations and copying letters, the places where the text may have been created, loom up. Through the action of drawing I can give an account of the line of thought. Seismic reaction or realistic Representation, through the interweaving of text and drawing into a plaiting texture my interpretation of longing is taking shape. Making word and image my own, adding, manipulating and making value judgements, I write, draw, paint, staple (using the stapler as an instrument of power) and cut an attempt to create kinship.

Marjolijn van den Assem
December 2002

SEELENBRIEFE
(fragment)

In 2002, the theme of Seelenbriefe emerged from the Thinkable-series, an exploration of the 'stream of consciousness' images evoked by correspondence. Central to this work is a bouquet of wildflowers, picked in the hills over Sorrento by a group of kindred spirits including Friedrich Nietzsche, as a gesture of thanks to Marie Baumgartner for translating one of Nietzsche's books into French. When Marie received the bouquet, inhaling the scent of Italian flowers and realizing the conditions under which these flowers were collected for her, she wrote a letter expressing her longing to be among kindred spirits.

Through the process of copying parts of this correspondence with a dip pen, I tried to determine its scope. Walking along the footpath they supposedly used (via Campagnano), on the same day, but 125 years later, picking a similar bouquet, drying the flowers and bringing them back to life through drawing, I tried to analyse the bouquet's message.

Thinking as I draw, the hand as a seismograph.

So far, SEELENBRIEFE contains:

• Three-dimensional drawings from the 'thinkable' series.
• Ten drawings (122x92cm) written with a dip pen with fragments from correspondence.
• Drawn documentation of the footpaths that were supposedly used.
• Three-dimensional landscapes, painted in situ or imaginary ones.
• Paper images of a newly picked similar bouquet of wildflowers. Letting flowers - brought to life through painting - 'wither' and stapling them together.
• Series of large drawings (122x92cm and 184x92cm) in which 'the powerful, agile dance of thinking' (Sylvain de Bleeckere) finds a form.
• Oil paintings of the 'greasy' wild Italian arum lily.
• Cut-out, folded-round drawings-cylinders (paper images).
• A steelplate sculpture of one of these paper images folded round my figure, so I can stand IN it myself, becoming part of it. (thanks to a subsidy from the Tijl Fund through mediation of the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund).
• Series of true-to-life pencil drawings of the wild Italian arum lily.

Marjolijn van den Assem, november 2005.