Folly
2019
Statement
The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.
– CG Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
In FOLLY Barbara Wildenboer draws from her own personal narratives, dreams and anxieties and intuitively connects inner and outer worlds, present, past and future. She uses the medium of collage to create contemporary Vanitases within the context of our present-day landscape.
The body of collage works are filled with both personal and mythological references. There is a strong emphasis on narrative and how classical and contemporary stories frame our understanding of the relationship between the technologies which are meant to help us and the world that we inhabit.
Wildenboer dissects reproductions of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510), The Ship of Fools (1490–1500) and The Cure of Folly (The Extraction of the Stone of Madness) (1475-1490) and recombines them with more recent images of war, science and botany to create sculptural collages. The idea of Oedipal Sight and Blindness and how this relates to vision, intuition and insight is also a prominent theme. Blindness is referred to both literally and metaphorically throughout the body of work.
By doing this she attempts to construct alternate realities that intimate an ostensibly apocalyptic future— but one that also suggests adaptation and the forming of new relationships, where all is not lost and humankind ekes out a tentative balance with each other and the natural world.