Elizabeth Alderliesten - Wander
Author Fresh Eyes Team
Artist Elizabeth Alderliesten
Instagram elizabeth_alderliesten
Website www.elizabethalderliesten.nl
Shadowy landscapes, trees and figures are conjured forth like apparitions in the photographs of Elizabeth Alderliesten's (b. 1972, The Netherlands) series "Wander", in which the artist explores how the meandering and intuitive mind navigates the spiritual aspects of the time-based act of photography. Employing a narrow and detail-focused framing in her photography, Alderliesten studies her micro-subjects — be it a hand brushing lightly against cloth, or a shadowy, almost imperceptible tree — and transforms them into "free and poetic visual rhymes" that seek to encapsulate the emotions of the artist throughout each stage of the act of image-making.
Each photo strikes a different, yet always delicate balance between light and shadow, varying from the more distinct, to the more ghostly and obscured, reflecting Alderliesten's varied treatment of each photograph within the darkroom. "Often I live in a twilight zone, floating between conscious and unconscious," writes Alderliesten, and although she comes to see the twilight zone as a state of mind, one could perhaps also make a connection between her use of light and dark and the twilight (mesopelagic) zone of the ocean: the lowest level of the ocean in which light may still penetrate, before one descends into total darkness. The artist's largely monochromatic photographs seem imbued with the sense of this shadow zone, rippling with moments of lightness yet nonetheless born out of the dark.
In focusing upon the meditative and transformative aspects of the darkroom process, Alderliesten imbues within each photograph a heightened tactility, enhanced by the textures of each imperfection or scratch upon the image's surface. With the photographic negative as a starting point, each image seemingly goes through a different treatment guided by impulse and intuition, so that to find some easily legible and consistent style in the images beyond their innate ethereality would be futile. As Alderliesten confirms, the photographs are images in themselves rather than images of things — physicality is of clear importance, and Alderliesten's dominant use of analog processes exemplifies the significance of the medium's materiality to her practice, which extends beyond the darkroom. The final, material image becomes a culmination of the alchemical and spiritual processes taking place at each step of the photographic act, presenting viewers with images that occupy the liminal space between reality and fantasy.