Premio Combat Prize

Plastic work box-in-box
Title work: ”Out of the box, into”
My work is the result of various interactions with newspapers. I recycle them, work up (often paint) articles, master them. The playful interactions with written text and/or photographs from the first period soon evolved and have become part of a more comprehensive artistic practice. By crumpling up the pages of the newspapers, the image has shifted from 2-dimentional to 3-dimentional. The colorizing and fading of the static photographs, together with the lay-out of text typography and photography, brings about a work of art that varies from an unruly cocktail to a tight levelled new image.
What’s originally in the newspaper has/gets another dimension through my manipulations. The newspaper is distorted, from wavy to wrinkly. In this way, the instantaneous illumination angle becomes part of the work. This piece is put into a shoe box; and the shoe box into a wooden box (box-in-box).
In the presented work I want to examine the relationship between the artistic expression and the social. To this end I invited Ella to address the public in my work. Ella’s native language is French, but she also uses English, Dutch and Chinese. The intensity of the work is related to the violation of human rights, more specifically regarding persons with transsexuality. The media regularly report on discriminations from citizens against citizens, but hardly anything is heard about the discriminations by authorities against transgenders.
Together we try to attain a symbiosis around freedom of expression. I confided myself to her experience and she was inspired by my pictural language. In this way a new newspaper materializes, but a more intimate one. Our collaboration not only created a pictorial, plastic newspaper, but also a newspaper that is full of tension.
Between the freedom of the word and the closedness of the boxes. Between the explicit statement and the sudden meandering and exploding lines and figures. Between the volatility of the newspapers news and Ella’s printed pamphlet-like text.
The work now consists of 11 boxes - each box being linked to the other. Together they intend to create a dramatic climax or turn.
The choice of a photoshopped lay-out confirms above all the improper unity of text and image. In this way, the stricktness of Ella’s texts brings about a narrowing as well as a liberation from the whimsicalness of the plastic data.
Belgium, 7th April 2014 Patricia Creyns
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Born in Bree, Patricia Creyns has studied sculpture at KASK (Royal academy of fine arts, GHENT). She studied further in the LUCA School of Arts (GHENT) in recent years in the class of drawing from model.