EVELYN VANOVERBEKE

Boekensteunen launch & Installation
Thursday November 14, 11AM-10PM

On the occasion of Saint-Martin Bookshop 4 years anniversary we have invited Evelyn Vanoverbeke, designer.

She has developed Boekensteunen (a bookstand, or bookend, we are not sure yet..) for the bookshop, which will be launched on 14 November during the MAD Parcours.

Evelyn will also be presenting an installation in our 2nd floor space.

At Saint-Martin Bookshop — a place where a curated selection of artbooks and publications is brought together — Brussels based artist Evelyn Vanoverbeke (b. 1991) presents a first edition of Boekensteunen, objects that can be activated and instigate a different relationship between the reader and their printed matter (the kind that’s bound between two covers). The carefully designed Boekensteunen are book rests for readers, collectors, bibliomanes, and bookish types, tidiers, sorters, arrangers and show-offs alike. They’re fashioned from triangular and rectangular pieces of wood, in a variety of sizes. Monochromely finished in a smoky blue hue, the objects address the existing interior of Saint-Martin Bookshop.

The presentation will display a selection of books on Vanoverbeke’s objects, some are stacked, some open face-down with their spine aloft, some sit in a tight-fitting nook, their pages pressed together, others reveal their contents whilst resting on their back. Unlike placing publications on shelves or stacking them neatly on coffee tables and on nightstands, the Boekensteunen invite the reader to re-position their paper collection. The shapes are made to be positioned in various ways; classically on a surface such as a table or shelf, but also hanging off it or astride one another as a set of two. The relationship between the reader and their book-subjects shifts, the Boekensteunen offer support and signify a certain free interpretation of what it means to collect books – in whatever quantity seems sane to you. Vanoverbeke observes that notions of play and functionality are often closely related. The Boekensteunen – and certainly when juxtaposed with the blown-up version on the first floor – seem to have some architectural, maquette-like qualities. The pure functionality makes way for investigations of spatiality and creative manipulation of the shapes. Not wanting to make the relationship between book and its rest rigid or homogenous, Evelyn Vanoverbeke has designed the Boekensteunen so that they won’t disappear completely in any interior, she allows them to take up space and hold it.

Aside from resembling architecture, I’d like to make a short case for the visual similarities with punctuation; perhaps a hyphen folded in half like a card with a slit in its center? The wooden

Boekensteunen gently strike a balance between the design and sculpture. The larger than life, blown-up bookrest transcends its purpose and becomes a sculpture of its own. Losing – at first glance – its original purpose, the sculpture becomes many other things; a shelter, a watch post, a transplanted element of a playground, a resting nook instead of supporting a resting book. With this exercise Vanoverbeke explores the flexibility of her designs, how she can stretch and mold them, enlarge them or make them fit neatly into a given context. Evelyn Vanoverbeke aims to facilitate an experience with the design of her objects. Her artistic practice is bookended by an approach to design that stems from a specific architectural perspective, the spatial organization of cities, playfulness and curiosity.

 

The work of Evelyn Vanoverbeke positions itself both in visual art, architecture, and sound art. Already during her studies in painting, she sought out the limits of the discipline. Moving beyond two-dimensionality, she considers a painting rather as "a surface in which she approaches the edges". Painting becomes sculpture and vice versa.
https://evelynvanoverbeke.com/