Marie Cloquet (Ghent 1976) put together an extensive archive of photographs that she made in the coastal town, and uses it time and again to create her monumental landscapes on canvas. She considers the images, both digital and analog, as sketches and sees similarities between her process and that of classical painters. Similar to the way in which the Flemish masters arranged the sketches they made on site, once back in their studios, into new, realistic looking compositions, Cloquet cuts up and mixes her images into independent entities that remain only loosely connected with the real world. After manipulating the photos in the darkroom, she prints them on drawing paper, tears them up and reconstructs them collage-wise, using watercolor paint. The rugged, anonymous worlds that emerge, play with scale, size and perspectives and simultaneously appeal, as places of devastation, to our collective memory; familiarity and alienation, attraction and repulsion come together in the viewing experience.