Semna van Ooy

Biography of Semna van Ooy

Collisions, slips and random hits, the images and drawings of Semna van Ooy (*1961) arise during the making. It is a matter of acting, watching and reacting, in which Van Ooy likes to use collage techniques. She searches for the accidental find, the by-catch, by allowing the unforeseen as much as possible. The work is about the tension between construction and chance. The work process revolves around the questions: "What is the framework?" "How much coincidence do you allow?" "When do you intervene and where is the moment that you stop?" The mistake and corrections are part of the work.

The reason for her work often lies in dissecting movement; in fragments of films, in frozen movement on photographs and in works of art by old masters, such as the bullfighter etchings by Francisco Goya that inspired Van Ooy in recent years and which she made work on. She is particularly interested in the analysis of movements, collisions and falls and much less in the subject itself, such as the drama of the dead bull at Goya. The collisions can be seen in the Accidental Drawings. They are (re) constructions of events on paper. A movement can also be felt with the images, sometimes minimal such as the turn of the head relative to the shoulder or more explicitly in the rhythm of a walking movement.