Ruby Waage Townsend
Eidelon
Kom binnen (come inside).
Het is ‘gezelig’ (it is cozy).
A structure of entwined stories describes the series “Eidolon” series, oil skims over layered, propped wood, drawing outlines around each form, each panel with a different narrative, part of the same book, chimera’s, illusions comprised of different tissues, mutating. Playing on the significance and dualism of windows in Dutch culture, approach this ‘perfect’ house, the watched and the watching, the shutters that never close.
Curtains and windows are the doorway between worlds, the performative boundary between outward and inward realities.
Into the unknown, wholly new world is revealed, full of its own set of illusions and deceptions. The Boy Who Ate Cheese, The Duchess with 366 children, The mermaid and her mirror, The ‘aardige’ wizard, inspired by Dutch Fairy Tales, transformed as domesticity, reality and tales intermix.
A lost sense of identity through family trauma and suicide, combined with small villages and towns, a deep family history that was covered from my mum with the watching eyes of many villagers, ‘picture-perfect’ Holland, windows, houses, a dad, the village psychiatrist, the mum, who took her own life. Here I question the illusions and perceptions that occur within houses, the fragmented mind, memories, escapism. The concept of dreams, both in the release of trauma and unconscious mind as well as the self.
“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theatre where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.” Carl Jung, 1916.