What hangs by threads

Tijdsbeeld by Anne Provoost, realised in lace by Marleen Dewulf

This lacework forms a Tijdsbeeld by Anne Provoost, a writer who for decades has developed a distinctive and incisive voice in novels, essays, poetry and short stories. Her work often unfolds against a backdrop of social fault lines and moral tension. That literary depth, recognised with numerous awards, including the Culture Prize of the Flemish Community (2022), and translated into twenty languages, finds a visual translation here.

For this Tijdsbeeld, Provoost chose a lacework that evokes a devastated city. Destroyed cities, she observes, resemble lace through their patterns, their repetitions and variations. Within that tension the artist can play with fractures and open voids, with burnt edges, interrupted patterns, asymmetry and fading grids. Through form, rhythm, the tension of threads and the presence of emptiness, tragedy becomes tangible. The city cannot be tied to one place or a single event. It may remain nameless, marked by a typhoon, flood, fire or war. In the lacework resonate echoes of Rotterdam, Tournai, Hiroshima, Aleppo, Ypres and Gaza, interwoven with those of recent wildfires in Los Angeles and hurricanes over Jamaica and Cuba.

This devastation also touches on Provoost’s own experience of urban life. She lives in the heart of the city herself and regards cities as brilliant and vital places. Precisely for that reason, their destruction is so heartbreaking. The care and attention with which lace is made evokes for Provoost associations with care and protection after trauma. The contrast between something fragile, handmade, and large-scale destruction and loss is sharp and meaningful. The slowness of bobbin lace-making also acquires symbolic weight here, as a form of repair, mourning or the slow rebuilding of order after chaos. In this way an image emerges that seems to have grown out of threads, just as meaning in Provoost’s work grows out of language and nuance. The result is an image of our time, fragile and inescapably interwoven.

Marleen Dewulf translates this Tijdsbeeld into lace, drawing on a centuries-old tradition that she firmly situates within the contemporary art field. Her work reveals a deep passion for the poetic interplay of crossing and twisting threads. The slow and labour-intensive process of bobbin lace-making stands in stark contrast to the speed and superficiality of today, becoming a conscious and gentle form of rebellion. This choice also resonates with Provoost’s own fascination with lace and ‘spellewerk’ (lace-making), rooted in her birthplace of Woesten in the Belgian Westhoek and in the awareness of the hidden hours of women’s labour embedded in this craft. The lacework carries within it that often invisible labour of patience and dedication, layer upon layer, just as stories, cities and memories are built.

This Tijdsbeeld invites the viewer to come closer, to look attentively and to read its layers, much as one reads Provoost’s texts. In this way a dialogue emerges between word and thread, between literature and lace, in which time and vulnerability become tangible.