Agniet Snoep

Time has an extraordinary presence in the work of Agniet Snoep (1968, the Netherlands); not the fragmented time of human experience alone, but precisely that experience in the face of the vast and unknowable body of geological time, as evidenced in her work, Obsidian. Coal intrigues Snoep as the tangible evidence of millions of years of life compressed into stone. Using shimmering black obsidian in lieu of actual coal, Snoep set about mining this stone for its ‘memories’, projecting her conception of the stone’s inner life onto its razor sharp surface. The result: dreamlike sequences evoking feelings of loss, solitude, alienation and forsaken beauty.