Anna Hyde; Bierum’s werewolf in the attic
At this
moment the work of artist Anna Hyde can be viewed at the Bierumer School. Anna
plays with the concepts of the night, the ideas of anthropologist Victor Turner
concerning rites of passage and the recently by its children abandoned school
of Bierum. These concepts are woven together by her in an intriguing fashion
within a shared story, in which she herself, as an artist, plays an important
part. Anna works exclusively at night and is hardly ever spotted by those who
visit her work. Sometimes a glimpse is caught of the person behind the sowing
machine, but in general Anna is as elusive as the liminal phase she is
interested in.
Anna’s
installation has fittingly been called Lukanthropos. As the werewolf Anna lives
at night and she seems to have placed herself within a shadow realm of
existence. She reaches back into both her own past and that of the school and
seems to refuse to look at the future; with this she places herself in an
almost liminal phase between past and future which cannot be defined, however,
as the present. Like the mythological werewolf has often become a werewolf
against their own will, so a certain tension can be felt in Anna’s work: the
actual children have left the school, but in the attic seven imaginary children
still roam around; children for whom Anna is heatedly making clothes. Where do
these children come from and are they really a part of the school? The seventh
child is a special child; there is something that sets this child apart from
the others. The number seven is a known number in mythological circles and is
seen, among other things, as the number for self-reflection and philosophy. De
seventh sons of seventh sons were said in the past to have powers of predicting
the future. The seventh child might be the odd one out, because it has this eye
towards the future; an eye out of the liminal phase.
The
liminal phase within which Anna has placed herself and her work turns out to be
a very fertile one. By mixing the night, an abandoned school, the rites of
passage with which Turner elucidates his concept of the liminal phase and by
invoking the mythology of the werewolf, she calls up the image of a village
such as Bierum, with an abandoned school and with that an abandoned source of
youthfulness and renewal for its inhabitants, which itself has fallen within a
liminal phase. Within a period of a few years the village has symbolically lost
both its youngest and oldest inhabitants (through the closure of both the
school and the retirement home). It has become a village without beginning and
end; lost in the chaos of progress surrounding it. Anna summons this feeling
without fault and connects it to the concepts of liminality and lost fertility.
The complexity of this situation is mirrored within the complexity of the ideas
that Anna showcases within her installation.
Katja van der Kamp
April 2017