barbara vandendriessche

Barbara Vandendriessche, Brussels Belgium °1974 Photographer / sculptor / visual poet ‘With my pictures and sculptures I seek for the beauty in the tragical, in pain.’ Barbara Vandendriessche worked for 20 years as a director and set designer at the theater. But more and more, photography, which she initially regarded as a sideline, invaded her professional path. She discovered how her experience within the theater influenced the language of her photography and experienced a sense of "back to basics", of re-sourcing, of being busy with the essence. In order to be able to clarify this more, she decided to leave the black box in 2017 and tell her story on the basis of photos and sculptures. Her photos are often staged and focus on physicality, emotion or expression. They look for a physical and psychological vulnerability. Her sculptures are a study of damage, both in the use of matter and in the expression of an emotionality. The broken, the damaged, the unfinished and confused are represented in different ways through heads and bodies. Yet there is always a "sparkle", sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, perceptible. In the Damaged Goods exhibition, her photos and sculptures come together and reinforce each other in the story of fragility, melancholy and psychological injuries. But always using an aesthetic that anoints, that offers comfort. My photography is theatrical. But ‘theatricality’ is an elastic concept and also has many negative connotations: bombastic, exaggerated, false or artificial. This is how I define it myself: theatralization is the abstracting and enlargement of reality to evoke emotion in the viewer, not through reason, but directly appealing to an approach that can be traced to our ritual instincts. Theatricality as a pre-aesthetic instinct. That is what I try to represent with my photography: how to portray the emotional body tragically? How to create a tragic image that expresses emotion and triggers emotion? Search for images with an intensity, no images with intentions. Images you look at because they tell you something, even if you do not immediately know what. Images that evoke a story, without being narrative themselves. Often with the female body as an expression of beauty