Ines is a German-Canadian Artist who has been living and working in Gibsons, BC, since 2010.

For more than four decades she has traveled the globe, residing in many countries, making each of them home for a couple of years at a time.

Integrating and becoming part of the local people and culture has been an essential piece for her. Consequently, each move has changed her way of perceiving and judging the world around her. This, together with previous studies in philosophy lead to her repeated questioning of the so-called reality or “truth” and to exploring its visual representation in photography.

Ines describes her work as a complex inter connectivity of experiences:

‘In analog and digital photo-collages I approach this topic by creating layers and juxtapositions. Change, fleetingness and the ephemeral are essential themes in my paper-based ‘skins’. Skin as metaphor for the fragile outer layer exposed to time and movement. To show the contrast of inner core and outer appearance I started 3D work by turning aged pond lining into twisted sculptures and photo-documented its variations.

The idea of differentiation as underlying principle of our thinking and feeling runs like a common thread through my work:

Skin is covering mystery, lines are pointing to the unknown, a moment in time is disintegrating, and opposites belong together.”

questions

1) What advice would you give to an art student entering the “real world?

Preserve, train and make use of your creativity in any kind of profession that comes your way.

2) What advice should they ignore?

Do something proper and earn some real money.

3) What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life and why?

Books confront me with somebody else’s stories, observations, opinions, phantasies, advice, views etc. I think that whatever I was reading influenced me in one way or the other. But I couldn’t single out any book(s).

4) What artist inspired or influenced you most, and why?

There are several sources: in my early childhood it was my artistic father who taught me drawing and introduced me to art in general.

Some artists who strongly affected my feeling and thinking are

Anselm Kiefer: his way to combine the raw and the fragile in form and material, to incorporate war and freedom, nature and science, history and myths

Robert Rauschenberg: (who I was happy to meet) impressed me by his conceptual approach of collages and assemblages, his courage to often change styles and materials.

Lee Ufan: Minimalism in paintings and arrangements, the orchestration of objects of nature and man made sculptures in a space, the simplicity of brush strokes performed like an act worship.

5) If you could have a quote (your own or another's) on a gigantic billboard, getting a message out to millions — what would it say and why would it be important to share this message?

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.” (Immanuel Kant)

Ines Tancré