Manon de Boer’s best known films include a series of portraits that consider the interplay between image and sound. In recent work she has been interested in the process of learning and transmission, and in moments of open-ended time in which ‘doing nothing’ can transform into play – and play into creation.

A Dutch artist living in Brussels, Manon de Boer was educated at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale (2007), Berlin Biennale (2008),the São Paulo Bienal (2010) and Documenta 13 (2012) and has also been included in numerous film festivals in Hong Kong, Marseille and Rotterdam. A major exhibition of her work entitled Giving Time to Time was presented at Secession in Vienna in 2016.

Manon de Boer was invited to develop a new work for Groundwork and first visited Cornwall in October 2016. At this time, and during a subsequent visit in March 2017, she sat in on sessions at the International Musicians Seminar (IMS) at Prussia Cove and became increasingly interested in the process of musical communication.

After the concentrated intensity of the IMS workshops she was drawn to the idea of spending time with children, asking them to work together to experiment with new sounds and rhythms. She invited three music students from Helston Community College to come together in February 2018, at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, to improvise and play. She now sees this work as the beginning of a larger project in which she will record groups of children of different ages and in different places, making music for their own pleasure. This longer work will be titled From nothing to something to something else.