Heidi Voet is a Belgian artist who splits her time between Brussels and Shanghai. Her artistic enterprise can be characterised by a wondrous engagement of everyday life and materials. She often infuses her quirky assemblages and images with a luminous sense of feminism and pop cultural motifs. Most of her works' titles are even derived from popular music lyrics.
Read MoreDespite their lighthearted appearances, Voet's work elucidates the incongruous aspects of our relationship to time, space and power systems. For her work Six afraid of seven, 'cause seven, eight, nine, I'm afraid of losing the pieces I find, she wove together an elaborate carpet from over three thousand, different coloured, cheap digital watches.
As a whimsical interpretation of an often overlooked domestic object, this magical carpet reminds viewers that time is both omnipresent and simply an invention for the convenience of man. At hourly intervals the watch alarms simultaneously go off in a symphony of digital chimes. Equally spectacular is _Ersatz, _a large-scale rending of a graffiti tag in the unlikely material of gingerbread. A spray painted tag that the artist found on Shanghai's famous fringe, the Moganshan Road wall, is re-constructed here against the prestigious backdrop of the Bund, now as a baked placard. In this work the fairy tale material of gingerbread, seductive and domestic in its smells, meets underground bad-boy culture, resulting in a paradoxical and multilayered work. Like the carpet and graffiti, Voet's vases use unexpected materials to recreate ordinary items.