Dimitri Vangrunderbeek
photo credits Manfred Jade
photo credits Manfred Jade
The Table as Madiator
Throughout my practice, the table, with its functional and spatial qualities, has been a continuous source of inspiration. The table is an object that creates the possibility to arrange things. I can react to this by creating new spatial and poetic readings of the table as concept. The table and its particular size can establish the conditions by which space is defined.
This interest in the table originated in the way I use the worktable. For me, the worktable plays an indispensable and active role in the process of making sculptures and designs. One can span things on it; cut on and into it; it can be used as a plinth or as a support structure. It can be used as a frame to organise and display things. It assists fundamentally in the making of artistic work.
One of the things that particularly interests me about the table is the way it is perceived in space. A tabletop is held up in space at a height of approximately 70 cm, and when looking at a table we are usually presented with a nice overview of the tabletop. To me this overview is like having a bird’s-eye view of a landscape. In this way, I read the tabletop as ground level, with the possibility to dig and carve into it and construct on top of it. The tabletop, to me, generates the possibility to create things that have to do with the relationship between the two- and three-dimensional and between the horizontal and the vertical. This notion of the table as landscape has also inspired to make tables in particular scales and from materials, such that a new poetic meaning of the table as a mental landscape can be experienced.
tekst fragment of D. Vangrunderbeek, Levels. The Table, Drawing Paper and Furniture Elements as Mediator, Brussels, ADAPT-r, 2014, pp. 61-66.