ARTISTS                                                                                                         Femke de Groot

Femke de Groot

“An art of slowness and matter, in which sustainability becomes language and the landscape becomes a 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. Graduated in Interior Design at the Utrecht School of the 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 the perceptual dimension of matter, transforming technical knowledge into an experimental and intuitive experience of form. After a first phase of pictorial experimentation attributable to pictorial abstraction, de Groot elaborates a creative process which she herself defined as a “cooking process”: through the manipulation of pigments, mediums, and natural substances, the artist generates compositions that evoke interior landscapes and elementary forces. In these works, matter takes on a generative value, becoming a tangible memory of the original relationship between human beings and nature.

In more recent developments, her 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 a supporting role to 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 immersive experience device. The principle of sustainability, central to her practice, translates into circular and conscious production, in which every fiber, harvested from local contexts such as farms and artisanal manufacturing, is reused and reintegrated into the creative process.

The selection of materials 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 contribute to restoring 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 become threshold images, metaphors for a poetics of resistance to contemporary acceleration, spaces of suspension and listening. The link with Japanese aesthetics is evident in the formal reduction and sense of silent contemplation: as in Ukiyo-e prints, the landscape is distilled to its essence, transformed into a mental space. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of matter refers to contemporary textile sculpture and eco-art practices, inscribing her work in a renewed environmental sensitivity.

Finally, the chromatic choice is linked to an idea of stillness and grounding. The neutral shades of linen, ivory, and cream establish a visual silence that approaches the philosophy of Japanese ma, 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 matter 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 a 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. Graduated in Interior Design at the Utrecht School of the 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 the perceptual dimension of matter, transforming technical knowledge into an experimental and intuitive experience of form. After a first phase of pictorial experimentation attributable to pictorial abstraction, de Groot elaborates a creative process which she herself defined as a “cooking process”: through the manipulation of pigments, mediums, and natural substances, the artist generates compositions that evoke interior landscapes and elementary forces. In these works, matter takes on a generative value, becoming a tangible memory of the original relationship between human beings and nature.

In more recent developments, her 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 a supporting role to 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 immersive experience device. The principle of sustainability, central to her practice, translates into circular and conscious production, in which every fiber, harvested from local contexts such as farms and artisanal manufacturing, is reused and reintegrated into the creative process.

The selection of materials 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 contribute to restoring 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 become threshold images, metaphors for a poetics of resistance to contemporary acceleration, spaces of suspension and listening. The link with Japanese aesthetics is evident in the formal reduction and sense of silent contemplation: as in Ukiyo-e prints, the landscape is distilled to its essence, transformed into a mental space. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of matter refers to contemporary textile sculpture and eco-art practices, inscribing her work in a renewed environmental sensitivity.

Finally, the chromatic choice is linked to an idea of stillness and grounding. The neutral shades of linen, ivory, and cream establish a visual silence that approaches the philosophy of Japanese ma, 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 matter as a place of knowledge and listening to the natural world.