Picture this: Marie Cloquet

In her work, Marie Cloquet, expresses a deep fascination for peculiar structures, whether natural or man-made ones. One of her first artistic projects consisted of a photo series of huts and shelter structures that appear in the landscape (2000—2001). Since then she has built a large number of shelter-like installations, using all kinds of discarded material. They exist as metaphors for the chaos of life and the human need for protective structures that provide seclusion from the hustle and bustle around.

More recently, Marie Cloquet has created large labour-intensive collages that form a fictitious landscape, using prints of self-made photographs touched up with watercolour. Several travels to Nouadhibou in African Mauritania inspired two works which Marie Cloquet is now presenting in the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens. The more than three hundred shipwrecks, slowly rusting away, have turned Nouadhibou’s coastline into an immense ship graveyard. Some of the ships have deteriorated to the point where only a skeleton remains. Some of the wrecks lie beached on the shore; others are still floating in open sea. Marie Cloquet is fascinated by the chaos and the ‘deteriorated’ state of most of the ships, which turns the landscape into an apocalyptic vision. As with the huts and shelters before, Marie Cloquet explores the Nouadhibou landscape in search of sculptural qualities which originate, somehow coincidentally, in the tension field that lies between chaos and structure.

How she creates a landscape in her collages, makes it hard for the spectator to grasp the build-up of the whole. What at first glance looks like a uniform landscape becomes, upon closer inspection, a complex landscape composition into which one loses oneself through the act of observing. The scale distortions and the various perspective lines turn the collages into visually disorientating experiences whose function systematically varies according to one’s distance from the work. In this way, the collages challenge the spectator into a mental adventure, in which the apparent escapist character of the landscapes becomes threatened by current social themes such as pollution and poverty.