In Conversation With: Ruth van Beek: b. 1977, NL

George H. King: Do you remember when images first became important to you – when they first felt charged, mysterious, strange or emotional somehow?

Ruth van Beek: I think I was already interested in images when I was really young. I would make scrapbooks, and I’d started collecting postage stamps, images of monkeys, that sort of thing. I then lost my mother when I was quite young – I was 15. Nowadays, everyone has a kind of 'extra life’ in photography, but the camera wasn’t so present in our household back then, so we didn’t have many photos of her. After she died, my grandparents wanted to frame a portrait of her; they cropped and enlarged a section of an old holiday photo, so it was very blurry, as if she had been really far away from the camera. That was one of those moments when I saw an image become a kind of weird photo object…so maybe that was a time I started thinking about photography in a different way.

GHK: It’s funny how that sense of transformation in the photograph of your mother – in form, scale, perspective, context – somehow feels so in line with how you’re working today?

RVB: Exactly. And then there’s that uncanny feeling I had when I looked at it, which also resonates with my work…I really couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have this distorted, blurry picture.

GHK: So, if we’re describing this image as a kind of early photo-object, when did you start to think about images more broadly in these terms?

RVB: Maybe it’s a big jump, but when I studied at art school, I think I always saw my own photographs as objects. I found them more interesting that way. For me, it’s the afterlife of a photograph that interests me, not so much the motion of taking it. I did use to take photos – really bad ones as well. When I printed them and let them linger around, I always discovered new layers in the image, often in relation to other photographs. At that time, I’d also started collecting anonymous family albums from flea markets, and I worked a lot with those images. I think I was grasping at how these albums had been thrown away, and all the emotion associated with that. For me, the family album is something you cherish; there’s this general idea that if the house burns down, it’s the first thing you reach for. Finding them at flea markets already gave the images a very sad connotation.

The point at which I started to see the images as material, though, was when I realised how much I was cherishing these photos, keeping them safe somehow, but I felt I had to do something more with them to make them mine, to reveal the kinds of stories that I saw in the photos. That was when I started cutting into the images, rearranging them in new positions. I remember one photograph of a dancing couple at a party: it was a happy scene, but I cut and folded the photograph in such a way that it looked as if they were fighting. It was a silly exercise, but I found the result really interesting. It revealed the photograph as an object, but it was also an attempt to travel back in time to a particular moment, to make it move, then set it still again. Animating, then freezing. It’s something I still do – open up an image, tear it apart, then put it back together.

GHK: Given that your projects often emerge from found material, do you feel connected to the unknown makers of those images – or do pictures become detached from authorship once they enter your archive?

RVB: That’s a complicated question, actually. They’re super detached in a sense: I don’t think a lot about who the maker is. But on some level I’m interested in the anonymous maker, the practical maker. And I like to see those traces in the image. For example, in an image of a dog, there might be a couple of fingers creeping into the corner of the frame, holding up the tail. I’m interested in that action, and in those traces remaining for me to see. It’s the decisions that were made when the photo was taken that intrigue me.

GHK: That makes sense – that your interest lies in the photographic gesture rather than in recovering the maker’s biography.

RVB: Exactly.

GHK: And, presumably, the found materials you’re reworking are themselves very international, or not so rooted in a particular location?

RVB: They’re very international, but internationally very much alike. Cookbooks, for instance, look similar everywhere. Most of the material I was working with in the beginning came from Dutch thrift stores, but when I started to travel for work, I would also go to flea markets abroad. If you take away the text and put the images next to each other, they’re super similar. In that sense, I think the household is a universal topic – we all have to wash our dishes and cut our hair.

GHK: Would you say that your work is somewhat insulated from place, then? I know you’re based just outside Amsterdam, but does that shape your work in any way?

RVB: I wouldn’t say that my practice is completely devoid of place, although I do have quite an isolated way of working. On the one hand, I chose that deliberately, but on the other it’s a product of circumstances: soon after graduating from art academy, I became a mother, started a family, and those things ask a lot of you. 

I would also say that I benefit from my daily routine of the household, of family life. I have short periods of time in which I make work, and I had to develop that approach from a young age. That probably influenced some of my work, particularly the earlier projects: things that were made quickly or intuitively with material that was at hand. It’s about finding moments to work regardless, even if it’s at the kitchen table.

GHK: I really like that idea of those aspects of domesticity bleeding into your work somehow.

RVB: I think in the beginning I wasn’t so aware of it; I was just making work with what was there…I wanted to create, but I had no money, nor a big studio! Photography was an expensive business in those days: there were no digital cameras. But after having made a lot of work, I could see the way certain things came into it: those ideas of domesticity, the instructional books I use, the small spaces, the compact archives. These are things that are now very deliberate.

GHK: Your work sits at an interesting place because it’s undeniably photographic, but also something more. What does photography mean to you at this point?

RVB: I never describe myself as a photographer. Of course, I work with photography, but right now my work is very much on the border between photography and painting. That’s also what I’m investigating when I’m working. I really like photography when it’s in print, in old magazines and books. In the era that a lot of the material comes from – the 1950s, but also before – the photos are often retouched to the point that they look like drawings when printed. Likewise, a cheaply produced print can have these strange colours or small failures that remind me of painting, which is something I’m looking for.

The works I make very much have two lives. On the one hand, they’re objects with shadows and construction, and when you see them in real life they’re often very small, but they’re very much objects with a physical presence. Then, when I scan the work, use it digitally, print it in books, it becomes photography again. It’s a reproduction that suddenly has a different life, and it’s experienced in a totally different way. It often happens that people who know me by books are surprised to find these very modest objects when they see my work in real life. I like that tension a lot!

GHK: You mentioned that there’s a painterly quality in printed photographs that often draws your eye. Are there other things you’re looking for when you’re searching for material to rework?

RVB: For a long time I was collecting everything, like a greedy hoarder of photography! That’s the basis of my archive: massive amounts of photography from old books, also very ugly stuff that I’ll probably never use. The archive is constantly developing: I search in different directions to add new layers. For instance, I once searched for lots of images of artefacts – objects in front of a coloured backdrop – because I’m interested in that backdrop. In my collages, I cover up the object, but the backdrop provides me with a sort of photographic space that I can make use of.

I’ve also collected a lot of books on flower arranging, particularly on Ikebana: the Japanese art form. There’s lots of beautiful printed matter from the 50s, but alongside the pretty images, there’s also instructional images that show how to make the arrangements. After a while, my focus shifted to these instructional photos – from even more boring books – with hands holding things, or fingers folding, pinching. That section of the archive grew and grew; I started to look at even more useless, tiny, stupid images! But when I cut these things from their original context, you forget where they came from and what the object in the photo was. There are endless possibilities as to what that material can become, or what happens when sections of different photos are placed next to each other.

GHK: Sometimes your interventions are very minimal, but they completely destabilise the image. How do you know when a collage is ‘finished’?

RVB: It’s very intuitive. It’s a little weird maybe, but at one point the image I’ve made starts speaking back to me – almost like an autonomous figure, an animated figure, and then I know it’s finished. Sometimes I leave an image lying around for a bit to add something at a later stage, but normally I don’t. I try not to overwork the collages: I don’t want to make them too pretty. They’re constructions made in a short period of time. I like to leave traces of the making process in the image, which gives the result a kind of openness.

GHK: You refer to this idea of animation – that you’re often trying to animate something in the image. Where does that drive come from?

RVB: I’m interested in how humans relate to objects – and where that attraction to objects comes from. It can be photographs, but everything else too: maybe it’s objects you use in your everyday life. I feel a strong attachment to things. I’ve had that since I was a kid – with my dolls, with the things I played with. I’m super intrigued by the way that a child can take a stick and reimagine it as a person, as something to be cared for. You create this sense of play in your head, and I have that with photography. Maybe that’s something I want to exaggerate or emphasise in the work. I would also say that an artwork – a painting or some other form – can really make you emotional; it can give you all sorts of feelings. I’m super intrigued by that, too, because you can know that what you’re looking at is a flat construction, but it still triggers things inside you.

Animation, for me, is not so much about turning everything into a character, but more about how I search for those things that make us feel something. In art history, particularly in the Netherlands, there’s this tradition of very rich still-life paintings, often with fruits or vegetables. These scenes were devised to make viewers feel like they could almost take a bite from an apple – or beyond that, to evoke something more than reality, something that’s exploding with life. The tricks they used to make an object step out of the frame…that’s the same effect I want to achieve. Sometimes, the figures in my collages step beyond the frame a little bit, or maybe they’re luscious in colour or shape, even if they’re just flat paper cut-outs.

GHK: You touch on the still-life genre there, but do you ever think about your work in relation to other artistic movements? Collage obviously has quite a particular heritage – of being overlooked and dismissed as ‘craft’ at times.

RVB: Yes, I do see my work within that broader tradition in collage, which is very much rooted in how women often made art with what they had available at the kitchen table. It’s about working with the things you have at hand – and I like to do that on purpose. I’m not making a huge monumental oil painting; I think there can be a lot of power in the smallest materials. There’s definitely a form of protest in that.

GHK: You’ve produced so much over the years, but I was wondering if there are any other particular projects that really stand out?

RVB: I think the latest book, The Oldest Thing, is quite important. It’s a small, thick book I made with Willem van Zoetendaal – which again functions as an artwork in and of itself. It’s very layered, with images, works, and painting. Lots of things come together in it, so it’s very precious to me. The book started from a collection of recipe folders I inherited from my mother, where she would combine cut-out images of food and transcribe the recipes alongside them. I don’t have many of her things, but these folders are very beautiful and so carefully made, even if the food itself is horrible – it’s very much 70s food! I really like how meticulous they are: there’s even an index with page numbers, all in her handwriting.

In approaching the age at which my mother passed away, I realised that a lot of the things I find interesting have to do with motherhood, or with having had a mother that I never knew as a grown-up woman. All I really knew was the cliché of a mother, the prototype, the role. I was intrigued by this idea, and I wanted to work with it somehow. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, housekeeping and my work life started to overlap more and more, because my studio is attached to my house. From these thoughts, I started the book with some details from my mother’s recipe books, as well as with archival photographs from books for housewives or cookbooks. I also had images of doll clothes from eBay, and collages that connoted objects from the household: bowls, plates, doilies, common things. All of these ingredients came together, and I think it really works as a strange arrhythmic book, like a flow of images.

GHK: The book really seems to be a place where a lot of your ideas crystallise?

RVB: Yeah, I would say I use the book as a tool to help me understand my work – and then to help me make new work again. With The Oldest Thing, my collaboration with the graphic designer was particularly interesting. We first wanted to make a big hardcover book, but halfway through the process he suggested that we make something small with double the number of pages. Essentially, he sent me back into my archive for more images, allowing for this kind of ‘overload’ within the book. Then, in the construction of the book, we decided that all of the images would be tilted vertically. It was a very simple gesture, but it really had a big effect; when you tilt an image of a plate on a table, for instance, it suddenly becomes an egg shape, a breast maybe, a vulva, a portal, or a mirror. I’m really intrigued by how a simple gesture can trigger so many changes in the image. It was like a motor started to run, which then informed new images, like a magnet pulling in more material.