https://lucymckenzie.com/media/documents/2020_Astrid_Vereycken_interview_TIM_magazine.pdf
With this as your background, is there something you would consider as your first ‘artwork’?
I don’t think there’s one specific work that I consider in that way. Many people want to emerge onto the scene fully-formed as the perfect artist, but it was the incremental little things I did, such as making posters, fanzines or music that form the basis of my artistic practice. Making lots of mistakes and made ideas along the way. An artwork that was really important for me, were the sketches I made in 2011 of cats in dresses. I was making illustrations for the fashion label [Atelier E.B.]and I made portraits of cats wearing the clothes. I remember this really felt important to me. There’s this idea that as an artist you have to tap into your deepest desires or your subconscious, that you should express something very personal. At the same time by showing that to the world, you render yourself vulnerable. You want to make artworks which fit a certain idea or criteria of something legitimate, serious, acceptable to an art world. When I made the cat drawings I really thought this was exactly the art I wanted to make. In a way it feels so self-indulgent, I mean ‘cats in dresses’, that’s the ultimate!
I thought a lot about what it would have been like to make these drawings as a student. For instance, around the same time I was reading the biography of Roxy Music where Brian Eno mentions that during his time in art school everything was about Cybernetics and performance. I wondered what it would have been like to come there, especially as a young woman artist, and say: ‘here is my art, here is a cat in a dress!’. This would have been very problematic for some people. Probably, it would have been dismissed as ‘frivolous’, ‘childish’ and ‘girly’. But when I made these drawings I really felt that I was living the best life.
In the end, they were used as fashion illustrations. When you’re working in fashion you’re working with different criteria of judgement and that’s what I want to play with. I made these drawings at a point in my professional life where anything I did was considered in relation to other things, other discourses. I'm less vulnerable now than if I would have drawn these in art school for example. Especially if you’re a young woman artist who wants to play with forms that directly antagonize the idea that you have to make things more polished, neutral or masculine to be taken seriously. I fear that young women artists who want to work like this, will either be misunderstood or dismissed. Therefore, I feel it’s important to mention these drawings as key pieces in my art practice
