'Het werk vordert traag, maar gestaag. Het lichaam wordt steeds jonger, fragieler. Ik graaf diep, probeer me mijn eigen jonge lijf te herinneren, hoe alles veranderde... Het verandert nog steeds, alleen in een vreemde, ongewenste versnelling. A battle is going on in my studio with my stone, my memories and time.' (notities bij  het maken van 'battle of the Remains II)

Dit graven in mijn herinneringen was er ook bij het werk: 'Marie'. Het is het tweede beeld in een reeks van drie koppen. De koppen rusten op arduinen sokkels, de restanten van oude graven die ik haalde op een kerkhof. 'Marie' is gemaakt naar de herinnering aan mijn grootmoeder op haar doodsbed. Ik was toen tien jaar oud en haar dood heeft grote indruk op me gemaakt. 

Over het geheugen en het vergeten...
Morgen ga ik naar een lezing van Dauwe Draaisma, over zijn nieuwe werk: 'Het vergeetboek'.
Ik las reeds  'Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt'. Hieronder enkele uittreksels.

"We must forgive our memory for yet another reason. It finds it easier to determine what has changed than to tell what has stayed the same. The people we have around us every day change as quickly or slowly as everyone else, but thanks to our daily contacts with them their changes are played out on a scale that makes them seem to stand still. It is unfair to blame our memory for throwing away editions when, on the face of it, the latest imprint differs in no way from the preceding one.
Photography has altered our relationship to our memories of past appearances. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the problem of trying to remember somebody and being unable to tell whether you recall his face or his photograph did not exist. This uncertainty follows on from the certainty a photograph profers, the knowledge that once, then, on that particular occasion, he had looked like that: that glance, that hairstyle, those features. These days we have something like a photographic biography of nearly everyone, from their birth to the present day or their death — a visual record that may not document every phase of life with equal intensity, but nevertheless comprises the entire life and records the changes that pass too slowly for our memory to notice."
Uit: 'Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt', Douwe Draaisma

Mijn dochter. Ze was misschien nét een jaar oud.

last week I saw the dissection of a squid. The hearts are really small, more like a bit of snot, then a pumping organ... strange experience, fascinating. there are indeed three of them, one has  some sort of  a square-like shape. the other two are like fat cookies... The veins are very hard to see, the blood is invisible, you can see right through it. This is a problem for me, since I make the veins in wax. Still trying to figure out how to show this snot-like structures in stone! I think I'll use Belgian Royal Marble. It has lots of veins and is very difficult to carve in. But beautiful!
The yellow parts on the photo below show the gill heart (with the gills in black ink colored in the back) and the systemic heart in light yellow in the middle.

The very thin white kind of structure running down is a vein..

I was able to film the dissection  at the university of Ghent. Sophie gave me a very comprehensive explanation about the circulatory system of the animal. This is only a small part of the dissection. With many thanks!!!

An octopus has three hearts. Interesting, yes. I want to carve them, but it seems almost impossible to find good representations of those hearts. 
Avery nice maritieme biologist from the Ghent university will dissect a seacat and show me how the hearts look and how they are connected. Next week is the big day! I'll make a video and some photos. Hopefully it is possible to carve the hearts, I want to represent them in some sort of triangle...
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/2009/301284.fig4.html
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AnimalHearts.html#The_Squid_Hearts




Another thing I'm working on, is the Battle of the Remains III. I'm into this competition to put a sculpture outside a new build home for elderly people. Let you know how it goes... I'm quite excited about it, because I strongly believe that this is exactly the kind of place that my sculpture need!