Anne-Claire van den Elshout: Icarus

Materially Speaking

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Dutch artist Anne-Claire trained and worked as a lawyer until she followed her heart to become an artist. She moved to Pietrasanta, where she lived, and worked, for 15 years. Now she divides her time between the Hague and Pietrasanta.

After the pandemic she was looking for a way to capture peoples’ thoughts and emotions in order to make a three-dimensional sculpture of them in clay.

Having discovered that a traditional scanner was unable to grab the emotion she saw in a split second, Anne-Claire was happy to meet Claudio Giustiniani of ArtaxLab in Pietrasanta, who showed her how he used 30 Nikon cameras in conjunction with a 3-D printer. Working with Claudio she could get what she wanted and began her project to capture the emotions around the experience of COVID-19 called My Collection of Souls.

To create her My Collection of Souls Anne-Claire talked to the person about COVID-19 and, at the exact moment she saw their strongest expression, she pressed the button on the cameras. Claudio and she discuss in this episode how they created the work - from taking the photograph through to the finished collection.

Another collaboration Anne-Claire made was with photographer Gail Skoff.

Gail came to this part of Italy in 2017 to photograph the quarries of Carrara but soon became fascinated by the artists working in marble. When she met Anne-Claire they instantly clicked, and embarked on a collaboration with Gail’s photographic collage technique. Gail likes to enter the world of the artist and elaborate on their process, creating more of an impression of the artist's work rather than its ultimate reality.

Anne-Claire tells us how it was working with Gail and how happy she was to have Icarus flying.

From her childhood, Anne-Claire was inspired by how Michelangelo expressed such soft emotions in hard marble. Below is a piece in tribute to him. Anne-Claire thought David’s victory over Goliath was an excellent metaphor for our battle and the optimism needed to succeed during COVID-19.

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ArtAxlab aims to build a bridge between the artisan world and digital technologies

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