The book Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off by Mariken Wessels, is a special book printed by Alauda Publications. For Mariken Wessel, visual artist from The Netherlands, this is the second artist book. Both works, the first Elisabeth - I want to eat and this book Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut of, collect frames, stills from video and old photographs, rearranged in a sentimental and poetical composition. This kind of poetry is also full of sadness, and this is not so strange when we talk about memory and things fading out into the past. Everything seems to vanish.
At the beginning of Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut of we are faced with the portrait of a beautiful young woman. Old black and white photographs describe her clean and honest face. But those simple photographs become fragments of memory as long as the time passes. Those pieces from the past construct an ideal image of youthfulness, but in front of our eyes there is also an enigma, with the shape of a vortical nightmare, full of color and grained pictures.
Who was and who is this woman right now? The book is structured in a way that the viewer gets completely lost in images, having good and bad sensations at the same time. But the question is: shall we solve the puzzle?
Many interpretations are equally plausible. Maybe the book is not exactly a nightmare, but just a story, more similar to a stream of consciousness. Ann is thinking about herself and we are luckily involved in her life.
The book itself is very well designed and composed.
Mariken Wessels, by creating this enigmatic narrative book, makes it possible to live profoundly Ann’s story.
© Mariken Wessels / Alausa Publications
© Mariken Wessels / Alausa Publications