Visual Artist Kirsten Otzen Keck

DRAWING AND MEMORY

Around the beginning of 2022, I began feeling a need to work in a way which is not digital and relies on using my own memory. Undoubtedly this is also coming out of my recent works, such as "One Month/ The Garden Of Truus in Amsterdam New west" (2021), which deals with memory, alzheimers disease, one's own near- by surroundings and garden cities. Green, open, utopian garden cities.

I grew up in what was called a "dormitory town". As a child this word was mysterious to me, and it led me to ponder, whether there was another sort of place or town behind the surfaces of everything I knew.

Sleeping and being sleep deprived alters one's state of mind and ability to remember.

Drawing from visual sources versus drawing from memory is a field of interest of mine. I feel drawn to deeper ways of drawing upon my own senses, and seeing how this can translate in my art.

We all spend lots of time with screens and media, but drawing remains something very simple: the hand creates dots and lines on paper. The eye sees things, either as imaginative images or as a relationship with motives, and things existing immediately outside oneself.

When one draws or writes there is a better way of remembering and processing that which one was writing about,- why is that? When walking through a landscape or citiscape and relying on your own sense of direction, how far will that take you?

I am interested in the realm of memory and imagination. When will my trail of memory stop and I might fill in with imagination? Where is the point, when I walk into a white landscape without data, images, memories, and can I depict that?

When I draw without a plan, when I simply start and let the pencil "take over" and draw the "dormitory town", it feels like the drawing is related to surrealistic drawing, automatic writing, and is a landscape in which I can wander about, rather than overlook.