Pillow Book is an exploration into the connections between past and present experiences. Much like the Japanese concept of a pillow book, where personal reflections are curated into a single artistic space, Vandebrug's work captures the essence of moments reshaped by time and the impact of our memories on new realities they form.
Joost Vandebrug often returned from his travels feeling that his photographs didn’t truly capture what he had felt at the moment of taking them. As a result, he began dividing his images into hundreds of fragments, recomposing them into new imaginary landscapes that depict not an actual place, but a past feeling. Each piece becomes a mosaic of memory, an eloquent metaphor for the multifaceted nature of recollection and memory - how it can be both faithful and altered. Vandebrug deliberately includes empty blue cards within his works as reminders of the gaps that exist in our memories.