Katrin Dekoninck

Lives and works in Mol (BE)

After years of experimenting with sketches and handmade animations, the development of Katrin’s multidisciplinairey oeuvre focuses on making sculptures. After receiving vocational training in Montana City, America, Dekoninck – now a decade in the making – models labour-intensive, monumental sculptures/installations. She shows herself to be a master observer. A recurring motif is the depiction of (fragments of) subdued, injured bodies of men and women, some in the early spring, others in the autumn of their lives.

The modelled bodies are often hunched over, folded back into themselves or harnessed to an outside world. Some have closed eyes or hold their hands over their ears – as if they want to isolate themselves from stimuli or harbour a desire to efface themselves, to disappear for a while. A subcutaneous tension is always perceptible. The sculptures reveal something: an uncertainty, longing, sadness or shame, a lack of empathy with oneself (ref. psychiatrist Louis Tas), or perhaps loneliness, anxiety, fatigue or pain. They are searching, tormented bodies that – like any living being – we can never fully know, but we can try to understand them from a compassion or find comfort in the work from a recognition.

Dekoninck sculpts mainly ceramics but she may also take up other materials, such as bronze, epoxy or wax

(after a text by Sofie Crabbé art historian-curator)