www.hildehermans8.com
Videographer: Rik Terlyn. Kunstkoppen is a project that came about as an alternative after the postponement of the Kunstroute 2020 (Art Route 2020) and is a collaboration between IGCS and CC Het Gasthuis.
With the presentation of its twenty-fifth Art Prize, the Cultuurraad (Cultural Council) marks a special moment in Aarschot’s cultural landscape. This jubilee edition honours Hilde Hermans, an artist whose oeuvre moves between several disciplines and materials, between the tangible and the fleeting.
Hermans works with what remains. With clay, wax, porcelain, paper, textiles, remnants — materials that seem perishable at first sight, but acquire new weight in her hands. She draws, paints, models, etches. Her practice is layered, intuitive and sensitive to time: traces, fragments, memories are brought together in images that touch on both the personal and the universal. She probes, saves, reconstructs — and invites the viewer to look at what is usually overlooked.
Skin hunger
Hilde Hermans made a silicone cast of the jasmine tree at her home. Like a plaster, a bandage, she wraps the skin of the jasmine tree around the lost trunk. As comfort, as a healing compress, as skin on skin, to give warmth and new life. The wrap is stitched with cordonnet, a strong cotton thread. The stitches are visible like a scar that will gradually fade. The wrap is like a corset, it gives support. Although the process here is rather symbolic.
A fragile trunk with seemingly stilled life, the tree may remain standing, so contemporary nature management says. Dead branches, wind-felled trunks, dead trees, they generate new life. In all the nooks and twists of branches and bark, plants and insects can settle and find enough food to thrive.
Loose ends
Hilde Hermans makes excursions into many disciplines but never leaves graphic art. Even so, the translation into dressmaking patterns is a special graphic excursion. Shapes, dotted lines, stitch lines, tacking thread and chalk lines, they are the subservient witnesses of something else. They dutifully refer to what is being made, the garment. In this way they are a unique piece of graphic art. Like a secret code. For the initiated. A manual for actions.
P’tite histoire
Josse Van Kerckhoven (1899-1983)
Here it gets personal. The venerable family of the late notary Godfried Van Kerckhoven comes into view. Normally their history would have remained private were it not that a great deal can be found about them on the digital “Museum-Aarschot”, more a treasure chamber than an ordinary site. Pieter Van Kerckhoven, son of the notary, manages the website and regularly adds tidbits to the family chronicle. That is how we also meet Aunt Jos there.
Aunt Jos was the odd one out of the seven unmarried aunts. She preferred to wear a man’s suit and smoked cigars. With her garçonne haircut we would call her “queer” nowadays. A remarkable person who bought two loaves of bread every day to give to the birds in the garden. – Josée Lehon, art historian