Stan D’Haene, from the “Handstyle Gardening” series, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

In his work, Stan D’Haene derives from different areas and practices, most notably horticulture. This would explain the presence of gardening tools as well as weeds and medicinal herbs in his projects.

Recently, he has created several painting interventions, which he unfolds in an e-mail:

Handstyle gardening is a performative palimpsestic form of writing. It’s a process oriented art that unites two of my interests: graffiti and gardening. I use garden sprayers filled with paint to rewrite certain words in public space. This technique allows me to focus on that which is to me the essence of graffiti: the tag. Contrary to full color productions one can’t hide anything in a tag — it is the purest representation of a writer’s skill. As an uninvited guest I sneak into abandoned buildings to practice my handstyle, room by room. To me, such form of writing is important because it shows the process of creation and destruction and the power of rewriting. Rewriting is perhaps a cyclical process, much like gardening. I can write about gardening since I garden through writing. In my practice, the process and the way things are written are more important than what is written. For this series, I wrote ‘GARTNER’, because it’s the character of the gardener which I perform. The process of rewriting is a spiritual journey towards mastery of the rewritten word. To perform the practice of such journey in a capitalist society is a critical act.

All photos:
Stan D’Haene, from the “Handstyle Gardening” series, 2020. Courtesy of the artist

STAN D’HAENE (b. 1994, Belgium) lives and works in Oslo. He has graduated from the MA Autonomous Design at KASK School of Arts, Ghent. He also studied Fine Art at LUCA-arts in Ghent and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. He is a water-based artist and works with contemporary myth, rituals, vernacular, nomadic phenomena and trends. His practice is rooted in his concept of ‘Gardening as Lifestyle as Art’. His methodology is based on extracting rituals, tools and ideas from gardening and exploring how they can be reconsidered in a lifestyle-oriented art practice and vice versa. He invites the audience to interact with his work, to acknowledge that it’s embedded in their world. Since 2018 he works on an annual participatory spring ritual with Bart Van Dijck. Collaborators include Cincio Odd Couture, Jerome Gardening, Benedicte Beldam, Jannes Snyers among others. In 2019 he joined the Tenthaus collective in Oslo. Most recently he participated in The Land Of the Confused residency at Komplot, Brussels, and the Waldeinsamkeit off-site residency curated by Koi Persyn.
standhaene.be
@stan.dhaene





© 2020, STAN D’HAENE
& GUEST ROOMS