Biography

Marjan Eggermont emigrated from the Netherlands at the age of 20. She studied military history and fine art at the University of Calgary, earning a BA, BFA and MFA. Eggermont focuses on concepts of identity, place and memory in works such as Double Dutch 2U and My Life on the Island of Disbelief. She is highly innovative in her approach to printmaking, often forgoing traditional printmaking on paper for metal surfaces.

Marjan currently practices in Calgary and teaches Engineering, Design and Communication at the University of Calgary, School of Engineering.

Interview Transcript

Q1. Marjan discusses her relationship with landscape as a central idea in her work.

48 seconds

Johanna Plant (JP): Can you tell me how you come up with your ideas?

Marjan Eggermont (ME): Landscape was always something that I was interested in historically but then moving from a country to Canada, you lose your own landscape and so I started looking at body textures as landscape. If you take close up photographs of skin, it starts to look like far away photographs of the earth sort of micro and macro imagery. So the two started to blend it was either based on the body or based on the landscape or a combination of both. It was all related to being part of a place or not part of a place.

Q2. Marjan discusses the collage technique she used to create her print Multiply.

53 seconds

JP: So Marjan, this is a very early piece that you did, can you tell me a bit about it, please?

ME: It's a combination of imagery from Calgary so at the time I was doing collages and then silk screening them so there's Hitler's ear in there, this is a remnant of my military history degree. I had a postage stamp of him from 1942 so his ear is there and there's the Burn's building behind, an image of a fence and a then a sign from a back alley. And the title Multiply is basically, how combinations in historical periods produce events that are kind of out of control. The image is supposed to work that way.

Q3. Marjan discusses her print Mother Tongue/Moerstaal and the personal experiences that inspired this work.

1 minute 31 seconds

JP: So you spoke a bit about your heritage and coming from Holland and this work seems to be building on that. Can you tell me a bit more about it?

ME: Yeah, it has the title Mother Tongue and then the Dutch which is Moerstaal which is a bit more slang than mother tongue but means the same thing. Yeah, this one, basically at that time I wasn't in the happiest of days. I was a single parent during this period and the figure is holding a child but the child is not there. So I mean that was partially the twice a month having to visit Dad part that you have to get used to and sort of the empty bed with, the bed is from an ad for plastic covers, right. This is a plastic covering over an empty double bed so it was basically the loss of that part of your life and then making a decision you know whether to teach my son my first language which I decided to do so he speaks Dutch now as well. Which for a Canadian kid it's not bad that he can do that. So it's just a lot of decision making and that's where the print comes from.

Q4. Marjan discusses her print Double Dutch 2U and her use of imagery from the Dutch landscape tradition.

1 minute 33 seconds

JP: So we have a slightly more recent work here. This one was done in 2005 and I think we're seeing you pick up on the landscape and the Dutch landscape tradition again. Do you want to tell me a bit more about this print?

ME: The title is Double Dutch 2U. I was again looking at the Dutch landscape paintings and started to pick out kind of the most recognizable aspects of the paintings, for me anyways. If you're looking at them over and over there's usually one tree or one building or one hill that sticks with you. So I was basically photo shopping single trees out of these landscape paintings and in this case I was mirroring them with some software. In this entire series all the trees are pillaged from some seventeenth century landscapes. It's basically, you know I think when you move from one place and you've lived in two places for a long time you start to constantly do this back and forth. What was it like there? What's it like here? How would I, if I moved back, how would I do over there? So it's kind of this spot where you are in the middle and you are constantly looking at yourself in both places and then coming to the conclusion that you are not Dutch and I'm not Canadian either.

Q5. Marjan Eggermont describes her work My Life on the Island of Disbelief and her exploration of place and memory.

1 minute 10 seconds

ME: The Island is more an isolationist kind of place where you are, you know in movies you see people pacing on deserted islands and that's kind of what the Island of Disbelief is about, is being on this Island full of memories of either paintings or actual beach walks or places that you've been, where you grew up and that's still with you but you're kind of looking out from the Island and saying okay. Canada of course if stunning and beautiful but you don't have the childhood memories from the place so there's a kind of disjointedness. I moved here when I was about nineteen or twenty so I had a very vivid Dutch experience, obviously but I think it's like that for most people, well, for a lot of Canadians, most Canadians are not from Canada. I think that's recognizable that you know you try to fit in but there's always that element that maybe what I'm doing right now is not very Canadian and often that's the case (laughs).

Q6. Marjan discusses how her research into Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibit started her interest in printmaking.

2 minutes 18 seconds

JP: Marjan can you tell me how you became a printmaker?

ME: The short answer is by researching Hitler's degenerate art exhibit which was an exhibit where he gathered together all of the work that he found was despicable and degenerate and done by low-lifes and he put it all together in an exhibition in 1937. He would put up paintings that were inspired by African masks and therefore abstract and put photographs of people with disabilities next to them to compare them and say that these people are painting people with disabilities and therefore this art is degenerate and we all know what happened in Nazi Germany and what type of people were sent to the camps. So that whole event intrigued me so much and the work was very powerful, these very large black and white woodcut prints and to me black and white work is always by far the most powerful the most political and at the time I was really interested in that so I wanted to find out how to make work like that. I had finished a degree in military history and I had done a little bit of pre-med and you know was always interested in research and process so I decided that printmaking was the right area for me which I think is why I responded to it so well. In my final year of military history I started making woodcut prints for all my papers so my history professors would immediately say can we take the prints out and you can have your paper back.

JP: Was it to illustrate the paper?

ME: Yes, so I've one professor who has a bunch of stuff. We still run into each other, he's a really good professor. And then I had taken some classes with Bill Laing to do printmaking and with Noboru Sawai and John Will so I decided that I would continue. Bill is somebody who keeps you going so I kept going all the way through a Masters.

Q7. Marjan discusses the most satisfying and frustrating aspects of printmaking of for her.

1 minute 34 seconds

JP: This is a two-part question for you. I was wondering if could tell me what you find most satisfying about printmaking and then on the flip-side maybe what you find the most frustrating.

ME: The most satisfying would be the process. I'm never too interested in the end product funnily enough but I like getting to the end product, that whole phase of, well again, the research, and the work with the computer. The thing I don't like about printmaking is the toxic end of the things, which is the part I'm trying too shift away from. I think that happens to a lot of printmakers. They either get sick first, from all the materials, and have to switch or they make the switch right before they get sick. I think that in terms of printmaking, the materials are getting better; there are more water-based material out there. What I also like about printmaking and I can't forget this part is the community aspect of it. Printmakers tend to have a lot of group shows and they have collective studios. There's a much more organized body that you can become a part of and maybe that's because they're all anal-retentive and they're good at writing names down and having systems in place because it's a very systems oriented art making.

Q8. Marjan discusses Sybil Andrew's print Speedway and why she finds it compelling.

1 minute 34 seconds

JP: So we're looking at some Sybil Andrews prints and I'm wondering if you could tell me why you picked this artist to discuss.

ME: The reason they appeal to me is because they remind me of my first obsession which was you know the German Expressionists and Italian Futurism and this whole movement of showing industrialization and movement and mechanization. You know to show three motorcycles in 1934, it has a bit of a militaristic look to me; the repetition is very sort of army-like. I think this really reminds me of that period of studying military history. I studied a big chunk of inter-war diplomacy, which is this kind of period, the 1930s; almost more happened from 1930-1940 then after. More people died after 1940 but in terms of changes in the system that was a really huge period of change. So this, I mean it's amazing the amount of movement that's in a two-dimensional piece of paper. It's a great thing to show students on how to create movement in an artwork. You know it has a really nice diagonal composition. Has a great use of colour. It uses sort of muted primary colours and some complementary colours so it's a really good formal art piece, almost. You know, you can pull out so much stuff.

Q9. Marjan discusses John Will's print Great Moments in Sports VI, Old Number 36's Last Time at Bat and his appreciation for "high art" and "low art."

3 minutes 20 seconds

ME: I was reading up on this a little bit and this is his kind of metaphor for making it or breaking it in the art world and comparing that to you know the sort of sports analogies. He always liked to combine the sort of the high art with the "low art," so kind of high culture and sub-culture. He had a low rider in Albuquerque where he has a house where he has a house that he had painted by a local low-rider gang. You know he's driving it around town bouncing up and down the street. He's always been on sort of both sides of art. You know the stuff that gets appreciated and sold for millions and he's also interested in stuff like graffiti and painted cars and tattoos and all this kind of other stuff.

Q10. Marjan discusses how she came to know John Will and what makes him an artist's artist.

3 minutes 20 seconds

JP: So we are having a look at some work by John Will and I was wondering if you could tell me how you came to know him?

ME: John was my lithography professor when I took lithography and I absolutely hated lithography but he was a very interesting guy and you know it had nothing to do with the way he taught it, I mean he taught it very well. It's an extremely technical printmaking technique and one that didn't gel with the way that I work at all. The amount of times I just printed a black stone I can't even tell you how often that happened. There are too many technical steps in lithography for me to be that comfortable. I know that I've said a lot about people being anal in printmaking but that's, yeah, I just never really gelled with the material. This is really impressive to be able to print something like this. He was a great prof he was always smoking in class and you know laughing it up with the students; a real character. I asked him to be on my grad committee when I was doing grad school. I had Bill Laing and I asked John Will because I felt they would be a good balance. Bill and I will you know really go on and on about a certain aspect of a print and kind of you know we sort of get lost in the details and John would sit in my, during those meetings, would sit in my studio in the back with a cigarette and say "I don't get what you two are talking about." And he was just so down to earth and would kind of bring us back to the ground. It was always perfect he would leave notes on my office door if I was going on and on about a certain project that I was working on and he'd leave a question and then the question would stop me dead for a couple days because it would make me think okay what am I really working on. They were always very well timed and they were always very humorous. And that's another thing that I like about him is his great sense of humor. John, and well other people have said this, is a sort of artist's artist. I think he's well liked by a lot of people in the art community. He doesn't do a lot of exhibitions and a lot of what other people would consider successful. Some people think you are successful if you have lots of exhibitions and your name is out there in print and people are talking about you. John was and is successful in a way where he spends a lot of time with artists and talks to them about their work and why they're doing the work. He's very much a background figure in a way. Not well known in the general population but I think across the country in the art community he's very well known and well liked and very well respected.

Q11. Marjan Eggermont discusses John Will's approach to printmaking as seen in his print Naive Letters.

50 seconds

ME: Often if he would do a portfolio print with the students and Bill Laing, the print would often be about the people in the portfolio. In that way, I think he's a very selfless type of artist. He always makes his work about situations or locations or people or things that are very immediate, very political at the time so they're more a documentary style work and it's not so much, it is all about him but it's not, right, he has a very clever way of disguising that. He will often in his own work put himself in there as a caricature.