Rosa Muñoz Bustamante from MECA Mediterráneo Centro Artístico Almeria about this work: "Gerda Van Damme transports us to the threshold of individual consciousness and its relationship with the environment. "Epiphany" bears witness to the moment in which the self is first recognized, in contrast to the crowd. The staircase becomes a symbol of transition, ascent, and revelation, but also of uncertainty. Her work captures a moment of transformation that, while deeply personal, resonates as a universal metaphor: the discovery of identity in a world in constant motion. The hypnotic image she constructs functions as a crossroads between destiny and memory, a space where the symbolic and the real intertwine in an enigmatic narrative."
The sentence at the bottom of this installation reads: "I was going up and down the stairs, minding my own business, when, suddenly, it came to me: I would never walk in someone else's shoes."
This is an insight I had as a child, walking up and down the stairs at school, looking at the girls around me. The work is part of a series of such epiphanies (in production), translated into monumental works in different shapes.
The paintings are hanging from the ceiling from chains: symbol of our imprisonment in our own body. The shape of the installation reminds the staircase and the eternal going up and down stairs, as a torture of Sisyphos: we are emprisoned in our daily condition, for ever going up and down on the same stairs...
I am the only girl looking "at the camera" (see detail photo). Staring at my current self from the past, dressed in my sixties school uniform, but always the same person.
The text at the bottom is painted in a typical old-fashioned fiction-book typo (Century Schoolbook), in order to enhance the story-telling character of the work.
The painting is two-sided, so the actual painted size is TWICE 170 x 280.
This work received the Audience Award at the Prix des Arts Plastiques et Visuels in Nivelles, Belgum, and the mention of the jury in the same contest. It was also exhibited in Berlin and Granada.
