'Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.'
​— Emily Dickinson
 

A blank page, a fresh start. With every project, Anne Vanschothorst returns to the beginner's mind: unknowing, curious, open to experiment and discovery. This is her inner landscape, where sound, image, and poetry serve as source material. Their boundaries feel arbitrary; a deeper logic compels Anne to dissolve them, allowing the auditory to become tactile and spatial, the textual embodied, and the visual audible.

Anne is an artist with a harp.

She lives in wonder and wandering.

Composing is an intuitive act that is grounded in silence. Nature provides the outer landscape for attentive listening and alignment. She strays from the path as she’s creating it, curious about what association, disruption, or chaos might reveal. The harp is a playful companion, urging her to find the work’s equilibrium. She perceives her instrument as being made with strings of clay. What takes shape is a sculpture moulded out of music, often enriched by other media.

There is a rightness about the work’s suggestive textures and structures. Its value lies in what it stirs within the beholder. Reduce your pace; walk between the notes. Breathe, reflect: how does it speak to you?

Anne declares:
‘I am with the Poet, fundamentally touched and irrevocably transformed by the significance of what defies definition and what I myself cannot express in words. I am with Antjie Krog – she who sounds and breathes poetry… she, who moves me deeply.'

Other sources of inspiration that have become collaborators include fellow musicians, visual artists, photographers, animators, filmmakers, authors, poets and spoken word artists.

Her process yields recording albums, analogue and digital soundscapes, audiovisual works, and installations that live their own lives in the spaciousness of both the physical and streaming worlds. Museums such as Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam have commissioned compositions and audio recordings, and her video art has been presented and awarded at international poetry and film festivals. Installations include Still Life by poet Antjie Krog and visual artist Bronwyn Lace, for which Anne provided the composition and audio recording. It was exhibited and co-curated by William Kentridge and Phala Ookeditse Phala at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg.

Believing that a work continues its journey through those who receive it, Anne is grateful to see her compositions being carried forward by other musicians, notably pianist Jeroen van Vliet and harpist Josh Layne. Her recordings have been remixed by many, and these reinventions sometimes become new seeds for Anne’s own explorations.

Through her ongoing research project Das Harfenklangbuch, Anne opens up a world of harp, nature, and sound objects, exploring the balance between the monumental and the intimate. Music and soundscapes take on their own sense of time… imagination comes into play.

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‘I am rooted, but I flow.’  — Virginia Woolf

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Text:  Green Room Creatives