Tineke Bruijnzeels: Circle

For years I have been noticing visual links, especially in nature. I am amazed at how the wind shapes clouds, and how water shapes sand and snow. The resulting patterns are so much alike! Sometimes during this project the next image just presented itself to me. The connection needed to be a visual one: shape, colour, rhythm or composition. Very different things can look similar: the trunk of a tree can look like a pattern on a beach. I also observed that in the built environment patterns and shapes are often inspired by the natural world.

I took every photograph with my mobile phone (an Iphone 5 or 7). Not knowing where this project would take me, I chose the square format.

I took an element from my previous photograph and used that as the starting point for the next one. This element might be shape, colour, composition, subject or anything else. The 52nd image created a link between the 51st and the first, so completing the circle. In the exhibition, my Circle of photographs were presented on an oval 'table', taking the viewer on a visual journey, with no beginning and no end. This endless circle is not posssible on the website.

There is another difference between the photographs on the website and in an exhibition: online photographs are lit from behind, whereas the light shines on the surface of printed photographs.

Rekha Sameer: "I love how you see the world ... and patterns. I love the flow of these images ... beautiful and so sensitive ..."

Philip Lee: "Tineke's photographs are fascinating, many-layered, and do what all good art does: they help us see the beauty of the world in unexpected places and ways. There's a wow factor when you first see them and then there is the riddle of their sequencing and making."

Cally Trench: "What I most admire is the way that Tineke's photographs compel me to engage fully in the act of looking: recognising patterns, similarities and connections. This makes the series of photographs both emotionally and intellectually enjoyable."

Tineke Bruijnzeels: Making the Circle table

Making the table was much more of a challenge than I thought!

I joined four fibreglass circles (from mosquito nets) and laid them on the floor of my studio. With two pieces of string I shaped the circle into an ellipse: not a very mathematical way, but it worked for me. I laid out paper within this ellipse and made a pattern of 20cm wide. Having laid out all the 52 photographs on the paper pattern, I was able to decide where the cuts in the table top should be. I did not want the parts of the table to join in the middle of a photograph.

The table had to be cut in several pieces to be able to send it from The Netherlands to England; eight pieces seemed manageable. So I cut the paper pattern in eight pieces, and transferred those onto MDF, and with a jigsaw I cut out the eight segments. I painted them white and joined them with the help of 192 screws. I attached the legs, 70 cm height, and after having turned the table on its legs I discovered that this height is too unstable for an exhibition without constant invigilation. I decided to lower the table to 30cm, and this worked fine. Finally, I stuck the 52 photographs on.

Packaging was another challenge; DIY stores don't sell boxes of 150 x 40 x 22cm ... So I made two boxes out of discarded cardboard supplied by a friendly neighbour with a furniture business. After this job I have no intention to start making art using cardboard!

Cally Trench: Artists' Hands

For me, hands are as individual and as expressive as faces. When taking the photographs, I looked for a characteristic or revealing gesture, pose or action. This fascination with hands started with drawing my own, and observing their variation, flexibility and character.

Photographing artists' hands was a wonderful experience of travelling to artists' homes and studios or a nearby park, seeing their latest work, catching up on news, eating and drinking, and, on one occasion, swimming in the sea. It was the opposite of my usual experience as an artist of solitary activity in the studio.

These photographs are a recognition of how hands are both universal and particular. We all have them, and they are all individual. Along with our brains, our hands, with their opposable thumbs and extraordinary flexibility, have determined what we are capable of. Artists in particular are defined by what their hands and brains can make.

I took the photographs (on a Nikon digital SLR camera) in consultation with the artists, in order to create images that are characteristic of the artist as well as visually interesting. For each artist, I took up to fifty photographs of several different poses. The final part of the process was the weeding down of the photographs until one remained. The others were deleted. During that process, I was looking for rhythms, rhymes and echoes.

Annie Rapstoff: "A really rich selection of actions and identities."

Rosina Godwin: "They are all so unique and convey a lot about the artist's practices and interests through their hands."

Philip Lee: "Cally's photographs are full of character, of the artist herself and of the artists whose hands she has photographed, and tell us something poignant, significant, and new about artists' hands."

In this exhibition, the photographs were presented as signed and framed prints, installed on the walls of the galleries in clusters. The fifty-two photographs were printed in pigment ink on Fotospeed Platinum Baryta 300 paper, image size 20 cm wide. Thank you to Christopher Clack, Dulwich Prints and Printing.

Thank you to the artists: Nick Trench, Lydia Julien, Neile Wright, Philip Lee, Lorna Cassidy, Ingrid Jensen, Steve Perfect, Alex Dewart, Mervyn Diese / Original Syna, Jim Attewell, Monika Tobel, Mandee Gage, Roger Perkins, Rekha Sameer, Susan Elaine Jones, Sumi Perera, James Vinciguerra, Gloria Sachs (1928-2019), Olympia Polymeni, Silvia Ziranek, Mary Yacoob, Tom Christy, Ms Tammam, Tony Moody, Saliha El Houssaini, Patrick Jeffs, John McDowall, Steve Blacksmith, Noel Grassy Macken, Sophie Loss, Alan Franklin, Linda Francis, Nick Bodimeade, Junko Rathmell, Guy Tarrant, Christie Brown, Pete Mountford, Vicky Vergou, Malgorzata Bialokoz Smith, Annie Rapstoff, Paul Amey, Ritu Saxena, Graham Hudson, Kay Sentance, Cize One, Claire Deniau, Linda Antalova, Imogen Welch, Ahmed Farooqui, Daniel Lehan, and Tineke Bruijnzeels.

An Accidental Relationship

The artists did not discuss their choice of photographs and there was no planned relationship between the two photographs posted each week. However, they discovered that placing two unrelated images side by side creates an accidental relationship between the two photographs. Viewers (and the artists themselves) inevitably perceive connections and similarities. This is a natural human instinct.

Olympia Polymeni: "It's mad how they relate ... ! The similarities and reference between the two is even more striking and deeper! I'm so excited and impressed; I was looking at mine with its 'match' and I couldn't believe it, or think of a better one!

Val McFarlane: "I really enjoyed the contrasting pairs. Tineke looking at 'everyday' natural scenarios with a creative lens and producing beautiful images and Cally looking at very practical manipulative tasks and reminding the viewer of the variety of skills our hands adapt to."