Van Gogh House London

Van Gogh House presents ‘Cycles’, a group exhibition of new work by artists Clara Hastrup, Inés Cámara Leret and Vibeke Mascini. All three artists spent time in the house across this year to develop their works around natural and mechanical rhythms and processes – electrical currents, cleaning routines, ecological and weather cycles and the chain reactions that are generated. 

The works presented in the house lead us to examine how the buildings are never truly static, and  are composed of interconnected, delicately balanced conditions – vulnerable to changing circumstances. It will be an opportunity to question how people can ‘read’ and interact with the house, and where they see the boundaries between technology, historical narratives and nature.

Clara Hastrup (b. Århus, Denmark) lives and works in London. Clara works in a variety of media combining analogue and digital technologies. Everyday objects, domestic and animate materials are playfully transformed to allow for new relationships and provide imaginative ways of looking at the seemingly familiar.

Both the works shown are born from an intricate system of translation and negotiation between forces from inside and outside of Van Gogh House and centre the weather and its cycles as its own medium. Both ‘Untitled’ and ‘Wind TV’ are conducted from the purpose-built antenna installed on the roof and visible from the garden.

‘Untitled’ is a teacup placed by the bedside in Anna Van Gogh’s room. Depending on the weather, the teacup may remain still as if left by a recent occupant. However, the magic lies within the ever-changeable force it is bound to; as soon as the wind picks up or changes direction, so does the cup. It is tied to wind direction, synchronously changing to reflect, pointing towards North, South, East or West. The analogue signals are digitally programmed to determine the direction of a teacup in its saucer via a hidden motor. There is a strangeness, a pathos to this somewhat diminished representation of the forces of nature: the world turns, the wind blows, and a teacup moves.

‘Wind TV’ is a cartoon playing in the front room of the house. The twist here being that the FPS (frames per second) have been swapped out to match wind speed thus rendering the duration of the footage ever-changeable.

Here, both of these pieces invite us to consider the flow between languages and types of energy (like movement to friction to heat or the conversion of analogue inputs to digital outputs) but also the flux between personification and metaphor, between the inner and outer worlds of the house, and how all of these mingle. We are forever reaching to understand and capture or categorise things, forever cycling through language to explain a new phenomenon or point to understanding.

There is something of the ridiculous and the romantic: the human desire to conquer nature, to tame it. The use of the cartoon is key in perfectly capturing this absurd impossibility: Tom never catches Jerry, and Wile E. Coyote never stops the Road Runner.

This work never seems to rest or resolve, it makes us think about the in-between spaces that fill a house – piping, wires, timber structures and voids behind plaster, invisible or obscured but by no means mute.

Inés Cámara Leret (b. Madrid, 1990) lives and works in Madrid. Her work often examines landscapes, both through small details and the anecdotes that form them. 

Spread low across the first-floor bedroom at Van Gogh House, on first reaching this level, visitors are met with Rock, Paper, Forest: a painstakingly crafted picnic blanket. As with all well-crafted items, the resulting object somewhat belies the effort put into its manufacturing. Yet, the hand of the maker is not the only thing concealed. Evoking summer days with friends and family – soft breezes and sunshine – simultaneously, through the materials used, it speaks of human action on land. Made from a specific pine from Catalonia— the trees of which come from areas reforested in attempts to ‘stabilise the land’—Cámara Leret points us towards considering historic human intervention and our relationship with ‘Nature’.

Throughout the house hang a series of works titled ‘Air Freshener Poems’. These lozenge, jewel-like sculptures are made from rosin: a pine sap-based material that has long been used by string instrument players to give their bows the friction required to play and sustain notes.  As with ‘Rock, Paper, Forests’ the final material obscures the actions of its creation – the processes, the labour. These feel like the, not so distant, cousins to the air fresheners that excrete a potent ‘pine’ scent, adopting names of such products and rendering them poems. By using these ‘naturally’ based materials, Cámara Leret nods towards our wider and slippery relationship to nature.

Both works contain a narrative of material processes or processed materials. Not just in the creation of Paper and Rosin but also with ‘afforestation’. There is a poetry – or maybe they are closer to riddles? Riddles are more tightly woven, enclosing a meaning within. These should not be mistaken as a damning indictment of our actions; they are more a presentation, or tying together, of merely a few of the threads of research running through Cámara Leret’s work. These are offerings for us to consider the roots and paths taken, how and from where these things have come in to being and what was given preference over another; what might have been sacrificed or simply quietened.

During her residency at Van Gogh House in May 2024, Cámara Leret also produced a series of paper finger traps, which can be found in our display cabinets.

Vibeke Mascini (b. 1989) is a visual artist, writer, and amateur moth breeder based in Amsterdam. Using fluid media including installation, sound, video and text, Vibeke creates work where memories and mysterious sensorial experiences meet the newest technology of the rapidly growing field of energy storage systems.

During her residency at Van Gogh House, Mascini explored the feeble discrepancy between London’s early infrastructures and the electric desires of contemporary society. 

Stemming from this time in the house, Vibeke Mascini has contributed ‘The Spectacle’, which will become a permanent intervention. On entering the kitchen – the only non-preexisting room in the house prior to the extensive renovation and conservation work in 2019 – one of the cupboard doors is ruptured. Protruding from its surface are tools for seeing – binoculars and opera glasses. As with fictions of magical worlds just behind cupboard doors, these direct the eyes of the audience through the skin of the house itself, to those hidden neural networks of spaces that silently surround us. Instead of dreamlands, just past the cobwebs and forgotten cans, our eyes focus – at varying degrees of distance – on the electric meter as it steadily clocks the house’s electric heartbeat. Having traced both the current and previous wiring layouts of the house through drawings and with conversations with the electrician involved in the house’s renovation, Mascini converges our attention to the vast electric infrastructure that is meticulously hidden from sight, by pointing to this capsule.  This series of esoteric or even cryptic numbers logs not only our time and energy but also acts to capture that of past residents.

Through the varying distances created through the lens, Mascini hints at how these power channels are both remote and intimate. Often we conceal or they are concealed from us through other means, but given the current climate, this gesture makes plain the very real concern about consumption.