Colour changes were taken as a yardstick against which to measure and carry out transformation processes, changing colour from black (nigredo) to whitish (albedo), to yellow (citrinitas) – sometimes multi-coloured like the rainbow and designated by a peacock’s tail (cauda pavonis), to ruby red (rubedo), the royal colour of near-completion. Gold was the summum bonum, the goal of every transformation. Bloedoffer/Blood Sacrifice brings back eating to the level of bacteria when after 3.6 billion years simple cells and 3.1 billion years multicellular life  developed. After the Big Bang our world got its shape. Ice-covered asteroids reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets. The landmasses drifted, water changed its matter form into soda seas and in the chemical processes natural glass took its shape and form by the exposure to high temperatures by detonations and air burst, volcanic activities and the melting of sand, ashes and other silica materials. 600 Million years ago in these soda seas stromatolites could develop, ancient forms of life as algae in the then still empty world and the soda seas slowly grew into salt seas.
 

Aqua Vitae
The fourth installation Aqua Vitae represents the alchemical, the purifying water. The title refers to the life-giving water or the living water, an alcohol concentrate obtained by distillation. Water is also our lifeblood. Our body is made up of 70% water: in the lymphatic system, circulatory system, hormones and intracellular fluids. The alchemists refer to these liquid life carriers as the Aqua Permanens, the permanent water, or to Mare Nostrum which means Our Sea. As it is related to the endocrine system, water is associated with the emotional nature. The circulatory system is, as Rodney Collin said, an index of the essence of man (source: Freemasonry).
 
Piet Augustijn wrote in Fjoezzz 1/2009: “Water undoubtedly is a source of life. Life on earth would -according to various theories- have been created in the oceans. When the earth had cooled down so far that the water was condensed and formed as a kind of ocean, fairly soon thereafter life would have come into being in it. Water as a source of life we also find in the form of a river in the book of Revelation in the Bible. The water of life. Its course cannot become muddy because it is solidified in perfect purity, clear as crystal. The river feeds the Tree of Life with its evergreen leaves that can cure any ailment.
Sunny van Zijst is now working on a new project with trees put upside down: trees as parasites sucking life’s juices.”
 

Drama
Because of, or perhaps despite, her training as a theatrical designer, van Zijst has retained her interest in drama.  In the original Doric meaning of the term, drama involves not the doing of an act in itself but rather the happening of the event on which the cults and rituals created by regional or local legends are or have in the past been based.
Such an "event" requires a public: people who are willing to participate in the agreement to believe in something and to join in the game.
Drama derives its form from a construction combining, in a manner analogous to a collage, elements of monumentality, refinement, sensuality and a sublime perniciousness or diabolic aesthetic. The symbols and rituals needed to get the message across are clear to all; it is this that gives them their popular character. Those involved, whether as participants or observers, all believe in their roles and are prepared to give free rein to their emotions.  They do so as if no artifice were involved, as if nothing were staged.  Beset in turn by sensations of fear, goose pimples, poignancy and relief, they take the greatest pleasure in joining in the shivering and trembling.  It is thanks to this mechanism, this accepted game, that fairs, carnivals, pageant plays, puppet shows, halls of mirrors, ghost trains, fairy tales, circuses, theatres and films, as well as figures such as Santa Claus and clowns, and objects such as relics, altars and collections of curios, are able to function.  Such things are to be found in a more hidden form in the private collections of, for example, Emperor Rudolf II and Tsar Peter the Great, who stored away in their art repositories -the forerunners of our museums- samples and specimens of every natural or cultural phenomenon.  In those treasuries of curios and abnormal objects, they organized and arranged their collections in drawers, boxes, books and botanical containers, and in glass jars filled with aqua fortis or spirits.  No outsider ever got to see those collections.  They represented, first and foremost, the results of an urge to collect and possess things merely for their own sake.  How tempting it must have been to open those Pandora's boxes! ... Drama in the form of enchantment.

Enchantment in the transcendental form of skin adorned with make-up, costumes and masks, attributes, décors and furnished rooms, like the exterior of a Russian doll: there's always a fresh layer underneath.
Without people to visit and observe them, relics, churches and fairs are mere empty vessels, sad ‘houses of mystery’ - and it is precisely that packaging enveloping the drama, those containers in the form of chapels, glass houses, mausoleums, cupboards, boxes, the wrapping, the outer layer, the skull and the skin which comprise the work of van Zijst.  Those ‘linking objects’, those transitional articles, operate, like the phenomena mentioned above, to connect death with life, the past with the future and the ugly with the beautiful.  Reality, so often repulsive and sad, is shrouded in a lovely exterior of gold leaf, mirrors, imitation jewellery, voile, velvet and plush. Make believe: sham, illusion, hocus-pocus ... they enable the defense mechanism of denial to persist, and allow us to believe in the illusion and deal with our aggression, our angst and our mortality.  Using the internal and the external as the packaging surrounding it, van Zijst plays with expectations and effects, causing the forces of repulsion and attraction to inspire the revulsion which goes with goose pimples and the awe that we feel at the sight of fireworks. Bearded women, a two-headed sheep, the shriveled-up hand of a saint, the tooth of a martyr, the golden room containing the sacred heads, the umpteenth thorn from the crown of Christ ... nowhere else is such a constant source of amazement to be found!
 
Ultimately, the visitor is obliged to make up the story and to complete the picture with his own tale, announcing: "Ladies and Gentlemen!  Look on, and shudder ..."
Thus the work forces the observer to take up a position.  Black or white, for or against, beautiful or ugly, attracted or repelled.  There is no longer any middle way; if there were, the form would cease to exist.
And it is this which actually characterizes the work of Sunny van Zijst as a revolt against dullness, tedium and empty aestheticism, against the monotony of the overblown 24-hour economy, against the failure to communicate of the over-extended communications culture, against the spicing up of art and of the theatre.
Fortunately, we are able, time and again, shamelessly to enjoy her work, both for what it teaches us and for the pleasure which it gives us.                                            
 
Translation: James Benn
 
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