Hidden between the greenery of Haren is a huge concrete complex, cherished for years as a breeding ground for creatives just outside the city. Sjimmie Veenhuis (1984) has his living and working space in De Biotoop, where he has been making installations of everyday materials since 2011. Veenhuis studied Graphic Design in Zwolle and Autonomous Visual Arts (specialization in painting) at the Minerva Academy in Groningen.
“I'm not much of a morning person. From ten o'clock I am mapping things to get into a work mode. And then after my lunch period I really burn. Then I easily pick up a task that demands more of me – doing physical work, preparing a lesson. Between six and eight I am home and have dinner with my girlfriend, and then I try to be here again from eight to eleven. I did have a time when I was working here seven days a week, but nowadays I have to consciously do nothing for a while. Being away from my studio is actually the best way to relax. That is the disadvantage that you live so close to your studio, because then you quickly start thinking: just another hour. As soon as I get here, I'm going to do something. Just don't go to work at all for a day, every now and then you have to. Then I start working on my record collection, listening to a lot of music and watching things that make me laugh. Unexpected connections also play a role in my work: finding an application for material that demands it, but that is not obvious.
"During my training at Minerva I started thinking: how can I approach the transformative power of painting with materials other than paint? That is actually something I still do. Painting with material, instead of on it. that reference to painting is very concrete, because that transparent tape is not that far away from transparent brushstrokes. While you do not immediately see that it is tape. And its communicative value is also an extra element that I find interesting. In the composition I try that the alarming effect of the material disappears again. In a painting you don't look at paint, but at the representation it shows. I have been working on these tape works for a year now, before that I made hundreds of digitally drawn compositions and fifteen You're not going to make everything you come up with, because you want it all to have the same quality and you don't want to repeat yourself.
"By leaving everyday materials intact, I kind of limit myself to what I can make with them. I find it exciting that something retains its original form. It then becomes a challenge to do something with it that takes it away from meaning that has it of itself and of the object itself. I love to bring flat accessible materials and less accessible applications together and make use of what already exists. This naturally entails substantive implications, which makes you as a you have an obligation to relate to this as an artist. In preparation for my publication, I investigate, among other things, the contexts in which my work functions.”
The space in which an artist works is a place where day in, day out plodding, planing and measuring, where a creative product is created and where people think. In this series, we visit Groningen artists at their workplace. What are they currently working on? What does their working day look like? And what do they do to relax?