About
I, Karen Hendrickx, am a visual artist and already for two years I have been working on a series around dance and movement. For this project I have been drawing and painting at Art Campus De Singel in Antwerp for several seasons. Here I got the opportunity to attend final rehearsals of Anna Theresa de Keersmaeker en Rosas, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Eastman, Wim Vandekeybus, Compagnie Seydou Boro, Eko Supriyanto,… Thanks to an intensive contact with these dance companies I also got the opportunity to work during a dance workshop in their studios.
In my work I am always looking for the representation of an expression, an emotion, rather than capturing an image. In this series I try to do this by capturing a movement and showing the tension between the dancers. This way I try to represent the rhythm they express through movement, by using charcoal and paint.
Through my project in Art Campus De Singel I also came into conversation with dancers and I noticed that the emotion from which my drawings and paintings arise, is in fact the same as the emotion from which they create their dance. This gave me the idea to work more intensively with a dance company, in order to develop a performance that expresses the link between dance and visual arts. That is how I met the Liège dancer Justine Copette of JC Choreography. The idea for Sketches of Emotion came from this collaboration, for which we already made a video for the virtual day of the dance on 25/04/2020 in Antwerp/Belgium