“I’ve been thinking about my blue felt tip. You'd think I could let it go after all these years but no.
Losing the blue felt meant the set was incomplete. Also it was a very good colour. Losing it bugged me and I dreamt repeatedly that I’d found it. Like down the side of the bed or something simple like that. It wasn’t there though. I checked. I also dreamt about checking and not finding it. That was a very realistic dream.
It's often been proposed that there must be a great lost sock depository in another dimension.
Maybe they all have their own dimensions, the lost objects. Millions of lost dimensions. Probably the lost dimensions are small and boring, bit like a waiting room. Because they’d only have to wait there till they were found right? So there wouldn’t be much laid on.
My felt tip has been lost for some time, and probably it got bored…”
Claire van der Plas’ work Vivid Imagination imagined an alternative dimension where a felt-tip she’d lost as a child passed the time waiting to be found by colouring in the walls, floor, furniture and ceiling of the waiting room. In dreams as a child Claire found the pen down the side of the bed. On waking and checking it wasn’t there. Sometimes in later dreams it wasn’t there either.
Rehearsing the losing and finding, colouring the past and present.
The dimension of lost things is memory. It’s a dimension with permeable borders. Imagination seeps in and alters the memories. Memories steal out and colour current perceptions. They creep back in changed. It becomes difficult to tell the original images from the embellished or engineered updates. It’s impossible to see anything with completely fresh eyes, something from your past always colours it.
During the course of the show visitors contributed to the marking of the gallery walls. They brought words and pictures from their own memories and imaginations. They coloured over other marks. Their marks were also coloured over.
Every two minutes a camera automatically recorded the progress. Details were also photographed. The photographs became an animation, shrinking a gallery to only 3 inches square on a computer screen and two weeks to only 3 minutes.
Claire van der Plas is an Auckland artist who works in a range of mediums including paint, print and installation. She has taught until recently at Elam School of Fine Arts and has also taught in Singapore. She currently teaches print and painting at Artstation.
VividMoves, her first film, grew out of a performance/installation project called Vivid Imagination at Canary Gallery in 2004
Claire’s current project is an ongoing series of paintings that reflect her childhood dreams of moving to the countryside and of rural arcadias and her interest in A&P shows.