Adrianne van den Born

SELF-MEMBRANE

A search for the boundaries between the self and the world

In our lives, things are often more layered, beautiful, and unusual than they seem at first glance. Art helps me ask questions and challenges me to discover these deeper layers of meaning and other perspectives. In my own work, meaning, philosophical questions, and personal experiences often play a role.

Self-Membrane

My graduation project, Self-Membrane, is a response to the relationship between my inner world and the observed world outside. Sometimes I experience a gap between the two, and it seems as if I am a “head on legs”; a floating observer rather than belonging to physical reality. Where do I end and where does the world begin? Am I my body, or is it merely a shell, a carrier for my inner world? Is the skin, the boundary of the body, also the boundary of my self?

Self-Membrane is a quest for the boundaries of the self and the other, the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. In this quest, I harken back to a pre-modern view of humanity: humanity as a porous identity, open to external influences, with boundaries as membranes. There is overlap and exchange between observable reality and our inner selves, and the meaning this holds for us. We shape the world, and the world shapes us.

A meeting between these two worlds can be found in touch. Touch not only makes you aware of your physicality, but also of your relationship to the world: through your senses, you discover your place in relation to the things around you, to which you then give meaning.

Touch forms a bridge across these perceived boundaries and can thus help us find stability in the complexity of modern, elusive life.

By using clay, I visualise the meeting between the inner world of humanity and the world outside it. Clay responds instantly to my touch and is reshaped by it. In response to this transformation, I have been guided by the resulting forms: permanent, physical expressions of a momentary encounter through touch. For me, clay therefore symbolises temporality and materiality. On one hand, it refers to the earth, the ground on which we stand. On the other hand, it refers to the material from which humanity is formed and moulded.

Self-Membrane is a representation of the experience of mental and physical boundaries and the desire to transcend them, in order to gain greater contact and stability in relation to my body and the world around me. On the one hand, the membrane is present as a boundary, but on the other hand, the ceramic work also provides permanent evidence of a moment of interaction and fusion.