IRL | On Top of Everything 2023 -

This body of work continues to build on and breakdown images of ribbons and stripes as they work with the boundaries of the body and the built environment.

Marc Mayer wrote about this body of work on his Substack site EKPHARSIS:

Halm’s ribbon pictures … juxtapose horizontals and verticals but, with a measure of sarcasm. She negotiates their integration through swelling cut-outs that taunt the formalist dogma of flatness after dismissing Mondrian’s insistence on the primary colours, red, yellow and blue. Using an antiquated palette and a devious line, Van Halm creates the unorthodox illusion of relief and introduces an unwelcome spatial conundrum. Is the curvilinear and horizontal cut-out an object placed against the vertical ground like a seated silhouette? Or do the horizontals form the ground, cut into by the verticals, like a jagged curtain impinging on a stage of matching stripes in complemetary orientation? Which is the ground and which the figure? Technically unresolvable, flatness reigns, but at the cost of a thumbed nose. The roles in her striped figure/ground tango are reversed in at least one of her ribbon riddles, further flouting theosophical principles concerning the orthodox orientation of the genders. Put another way, which one leads and which one dances backwards?