SP w8 Artist statement 2

Writing my art statement really helpen me tell my story. Clare gave some advise and I took over a lot:

The first part is average, the second part for the clouds series. Have to write one for every series.

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Hilde Maassen, artist statement

When I was ten I knew for sure; I wanted to go to the art academy later. During the first two years at the academy for industrial design were mainly devoted to experimenting and working with different physical materials such as plastic, wood, metal, textile and paper. However through this process I discovered photography, the semi-automated process that in your hands gives an endless series of possibilities to record daily reality and to adjust, transform or manipulate that reality. I was hooked and changed schools.

With my practice I playfully embrace and combine both the analog and digital processes. The love for different materials and experiments that has come from my early developments in industrial design helps me to originate to new ideas and methodologies. Often I involve trail and error approaches within the development stages of my projects and construct circumstances in which coincidence and happy incidents can occur, where images to naturally arise through foregrounding the process led natural of my practice. I do not always know what the end result will be and that surprise keeps it exciting and lively.

The subjects in my images may vary, but I am always looking for a certain transformation or alienation often with a little exaggeration. The image itself must evoke a feeling in the viewer of revelation, wonder and sometimes even disturbance.

Dutch mountains, 2019

This series of photos are all generated from clouds. Clouds are hugely important in regulating the temperature on earth. They also play a role in absorbing harmful greenhouse gases. However, since the industrial revolution, clouds are now not only naturally occurring but also can be artificially manufactured.

Ever since the 1930s governments and industry have used scientific advancement to manipulate the weather. The Climate Crisis and human interference have major consequences for the clouds, recently have been gathering to move more towards the poles and are therefore less effective in moderating the overall temperature of the globe.

Scientists are now investigating and testing ways to make and let grow, clouds themselves.

In this series of photos, I want you to look up at the sky to raise awareness of a not so well-known phenomenon in the climate debate. We are all familiar with looking for figures in clouds and recognizing shapes, but what is going on in these images where the clouds get a mass and threaten to thunder down like pebbles? The images are challenging the viewer to question what their preconceived romantic notions of what people normally connect to this celestial phenomenon are.