Tine Colen

Works

About

Tine Colen

Supply and Demand

2021

During the exhibition ‘Supply and demand’ at The Mothership (Antwerp), Tine Colen presented an installation that consists of three self-made, artisanal objects: a nettle cloth, a broom and a woolen blanket dyed with diverse substances. She made these objects using materials from her direct environment, things that were sometimes produced for very different goals. The end products of a long and often tedious labor, the objects in the installation are handworks more than autonomous artworks. Their fabrication was led by questions about their functionality as utensils and about the value and goal of labor in general. The working process was also a means to discover her personal environment, by looking for whatever could be useful and then handling the found materials. The objects and the composition of the installation refer to a famous photograph by Walker Evans, a document from the Great Depression.
As such, the work also evokes current crises. But it also clearly refers to painting, which is reduced to its ‘media’: paint, surface, brush. Colen has always been a painter, and for her this installation is an attempt to let practical and social questions from the so-called real world pour into art. Maybe these questions can revive the promise that art could also be material and mental labor: a work that isn’t fundamentally different from any other work, and that is — in a very concrete way — reaching out towards an alternative world.

Koen Sels for The Mothership

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Works

About

After her training in the medium of painting, Tine Colen (1985) felt the need not to simply represent or imitate the world, but to be in the midst of things. Gradually, the following elements became characteristic of her work: The blurring of boundaries between art and functional objects by creating items that carry meaning and can sometimes be used / working with natural materials in a cyclical process, often defined by their temporary, seasonal nature, as well as human-made materials considered waste / seeking specific knowledge about plant usage through the study of ethnobotany and anthropology / a slow and labor-intensive making process, rooted in collective creation / generating value through the way objects are used, gifted, and passed on / using public space as a workshop, where the physical work sparks conversation, encounters, and change.

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