ARTISTS                                                                                                         Femke de Groot

Femke de Groot

“An art of slowness and matter, in which sustainability becomes language and the landscape becomes he has sensory experience.”

Femke de Groot (Netherlands, 1984?) is an artist whose research is placed within the scope of contemporary practices of material and environmental exploration. Graduate in Interior Design?
at the Utrecht School of Arts (2007), de Groot develops a language in which the rigor of the project is intertwined with an aesthetic and sensorial investigation oriented to the organic relationship between body, space and nature. Training in the field of design has given her a particular attention to light, texture and perceptual dimension of matter, transforming the
technical knowledge in experimental and intuitive experience of the form. After a first phase of pictorial experimentation attributable to pictorial abstraction, de Groot elaborates a process creative which she herself defined as a “cooking process”: through the manipulation of pigments, mediums and natural substances, the artist generates compositions that evoke landscapes interiors and elementary forces. In these works the matter takes on a generative value, becoming tangible memory of the original relationship between human being and nature.
In more recent developments, research is oriented towards a sculptural and tactile dimension, giving origin to woolscapes: three-dimensional textile landscapes created by tufting, embroidery and yarn assembly. In this corpus, the material emancipates itself from the supporting role for become an autonomous subject of the work. The artist explores the threshold between surface and volume, between
vision and sensory perception, transforming textiles into an experience device
immersive. The principle of sustainability, central to its practice, translates into circularity conscious production, in which every fiber, harvested from local contexts such as farms and manufacturing artisanal, it is reused and reintegrated into the creative process.
The selection of materials it occurs according to criteria of ecological responsibility and ethical traceability, returning to the work the form of a self-sufficient ecosystem, a microcosm in which matter, gesture and thought
they contribute to recomposing the balance between the human being and the natural environment.
De Groot’s landscapes do not refer to real places, but to an archetypal topography of the mind. Hills, trees and expanses of land make themselves threshold images, metaphors for a resistance poetics to contemporary acceleration, spaces of suspension and listening. The link with Japanese aesthetics is evident in the formal reduction and sense of contemplation
silent: as in Ukiyo-e prints, the landscape is distilled to its essence, transformed into mental space. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of matter refers to textile sculpture contemporary and eco-art practices, inscribing his work in a renewed sensitivity environmental.
Finally, the chromatic choice is linked to an idea of stillness and grounding. The neutral shades of linen, of ivory and cream establish a visual silence that approaches the philosophy of ma Japanese, where beauty resides in interstitial space and emptiness as a condition of presence. In this balance between formal rigor and contemplative tension, the woolscapes series by femke de groot is proposed as a perceptual and meditative experience, a return to the materia as a place of knowledge and listening to the natural world.

 

ARTISTS                                 Femke de Groot

Femke de Groot

“An art of slowness and matter, in which sustainability becomes language and the landscape becomes he has sensory experience.”

Femke de Groot (Netherlands, 1984?) is an artist whose research is placed within the scope of contemporary practices of material and environmental exploration. Graduate in Interior Design?
at the Utrecht School of Arts (2007), de Groot develops a language in which the rigor of the project is intertwined with an aesthetic and sensorial investigation oriented to the organic relationship between body, space and nature. Training in the field of design has given her a particular attention to light, texture and perceptual dimension of matter, transforming the
technical knowledge in experimental and intuitive experience of the form. After a first phase of pictorial experimentation attributable to pictorial abstraction, de Groot elaborates a process creative which she herself defined as a “cooking process”: through the manipulation of pigments, mediums and natural substances, the artist generates compositions that evoke landscapes interiors and elementary forces. In these works the matter takes on a generative value, becoming tangible memory of the original relationship between human being and nature.
In more recent developments, research is oriented towards a sculptural and tactile dimension, giving origin to woolscapes: three-dimensional textile landscapes created by tufting, embroidery and yarn assembly. In this corpus, the material emancipates itself from the supporting role for become an autonomous subject of the work. The artist explores the threshold between surface and volume, between
vision and sensory perception, transforming textiles into an experience device
immersive. The principle of sustainability, central to its practice, translates into circularity conscious production, in which every fiber, harvested from local contexts such as farms and manufacturing artisanal, it is reused and reintegrated into the creative process.
The selection of materials it occurs according to criteria of ecological responsibility and ethical traceability, returning to the work the form of a self-sufficient ecosystem, a microcosm in which matter, gesture and thought
they contribute to recomposing the balance between the human being and the natural environment.
De Groot’s landscapes do not refer to real places, but to an archetypal topography of the mind. Hills, trees and expanses of land make themselves threshold images, metaphors for a resistance poetics to contemporary acceleration, spaces of suspension and listening. The link with Japanese aesthetics is evident in the formal reduction and sense of contemplation
silent: as in Ukiyo-e prints, the landscape is distilled to its essence, transformed into mental space. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of matter refers to textile sculpture contemporary and eco-art practices, inscribing his work in a renewed sensitivity environmental.
Finally, the chromatic choice is linked to an idea of stillness and grounding. The neutral shades of linen, of ivory and cream establish a visual silence that approaches the philosophy of ma Japanese, where beauty resides in interstitial space and emptiness as a condition of presence. In this balance between formal rigor and contemplative tension, the woolscapes series by femke de groot is proposed as a perceptual and meditative experience, a return to the materia as a place of knowledge and listening to the natural world.