Freerk Wilbers
Art means different things to different people. What does art mean to you?
For me art is freedom to follow your own path and to create. To work with your hands and to be surrounded by those things and the smell of the materials you work with and to discover something new in them every time. This brings me to findings and discoveries that I never thought I would get to. During my process I keep finding something new and for me that is the essence of what I do. What I am trying to achieve in my work is not necessarily intellectual. It is not tied to any particular story or message. It is more of a sensory experience that I am trying to convey. A calm feeling that something is happening that repeats itself, but that is never the same. Something that has a certain element of renewal, a kind of unpredictability. Not wild or terrifying, but rather calming. Something cosmic? That is not a word that I often use, but perhaps a word that I often think of myself. How galaxies move around each other, how planets move around each other or how particles move around each other within an atom. There's a kind of reassuring repetition and precision to it. Kind of a cosmic model of how things work. An underlying machine of the world that is constantly on and moving.
What do you consider key elements in your work?
That it keeps going, whether there is a spectator or not. Just like planets that keep moving, whether someone is looking at them or not. An element that I often use is the circle. Not only literally, there are many circular shapes in my work and things also move in circular paths, but also figuratively. There is no beginning or end to my work. That refers to nature, as well. Days, seasons, tides, they repeat themselves, but never in exactly the same way. I am looking for rhythms, in images, but also in sound. In time and in space.
What’s also important is that the movements, the dynamics between the different elements are not controlled. I use a motor to give the works a kind of push. They are not programmed. The motion is something that follows from the interactions between the laws of physics that operate on all parts. I don’t always know in advance what it will do, but I try to design the conditions and then I put it in motion and then I have to wait. In fact, the movements are so complicated that you can no longer calculate them, you can only try them out. That element that you do not know exactly what is going to happen, I find very exciting.
Werk
Bio
In 2017 studeerde ik af als beeldend kunstenaar aan de KABK in Den Haag. Daarvoor werkte ik als onder meer aan grote bouw- en onderhoudsprojecten als consultant, als engineer in het Biorobotics Lab van de TU Delft aan robotarmen en -handen, en gedurende een half jaar bij prof. Ishiguro in Osaka, Japan aan het leren spreken van een robot-android. In 2008 studeerde ik af aan de TU Delft als werktuigbouwkundige, met specialisatie robotica.
