Exposure, for Ensemble Black Pencil
15 March 2025
Ensemble Black Pencil commissioned me to write a new composition with a land art work in the province of Flevoland.
When I first encountered Antony Gormley's Exposure, I was struck not by its stillness, but by everything moving around it. The sculpture—a massive figure crouched at the edge of the Markermeer—might seem frozen in time, but it exists in constant dialogue with its surroundings. The shifting light, the rolling clouds, the restless water, and the changing seasons all transform the experience of Exposure. It is never the same sculpture twice.
This idea of change—of time as a force that shapes and reshapes—became the foundation of my composition. I wanted to write music that captured this motion, this flux. While composing, I kept returning to M. Vasalis's poem Time. Her words describe time as something that rushes forward yet carries us gently within it. She writes of trees bursting from the earth and seas swelling and retreating, images that felt deeply connected to the environment surrounding Exposure.
In my music, I tried to reflect this duality: the unstoppable momentum of time and its quiet moments of reflection. The ensemble becomes a kind of landscape itself—always shifting, always alive. It is about stillness amidst movement, about how even what seems permanent is constantly being remade by the world around it.