Nature Inspired and Oriented Artworks | Hannah Streefkerk
Nature Inspired and Oriented Artworks | Hannah Streefkerk
Hannah Streefkerk was born in 1973 in Groningen, The Netherlands and is living and working in Sauwerd, Groningen. Hannah Streefkerk’s artworks are nature-oriented, inspired by natural elements such as water and land formations, trees, flowers and rocky landscapes. With a certain sensibility towards rhythms, structures and patterns, she extracts the essences of various forms in nature and translates them into site-specific works of art. In some of her works, she uses a strict geometric vocabulary, reducing natural forms into squares, circles and lines, whereas a more organic and soft expression is prevalent in other works.
Streefkerk renders her observations of nature’s patterns and forms on a relatively intimate scale, allowing viewers to interact with her art works by walking around and in between them. The artworks take the viewers by surprise, as they often appear to sprout from nature itself. Always carefully placed by the artist, they blend in or function as quirky additions to their environment – like bandages on wounded trees or a stitched up circle of grass. The viewers’ eyes are opened to nature in a new way, as these unusual objects surprise and puzzle us. Always with a note of humour and poetry, Streefkerk creates dialogues between her audience and Nature, inviting us to see and experience our surroundings in new ways and to consequently investigate these fresh openings in our otherwise fixed perception of reality.
Materials such as thread and yarn are recurring elements in Streefkerk’s work, as are various traditional forms of craft such as sewing and crocheting. The use of yarn runs like a red thread, a common theme, through her work, and she indeed plays with the concept of this by using red yarn – for example in a series of works containing carefully placed red yarn in nature, made in Norway in 2006. By using traditional techniques, she seems to insist on the importance of something durable and lasting, which is also reflected in the comments about modern life she makes through her work, implicitly problematising a use-and-discard mentality.
Streefkerk lets crocheted drops of water drip from trusses inside a glass corridor, and allows jellyfish to spread their woollen tentacles in tree tops. With a portable patch of grass, she gives city-dwellers a green place to relax and gather their thoughts far away from wild nature. And with wooden boxes strewn like dice across the grass, a geometric formalism is introduced into nature as a playful exploration of shape, surface and texture. In Streefkerk’s installation art, elements are shifted from their natural environment and recontextualised in a new setting, generating complex narratives, while also being engaging visual experiences. Streefkerk’s works of art enrich the site of choice by adding an extra dimension to it, but without marring or drowning out the original character of the place. More / Lise Sinnbeck
Via www.waanwaar.nl
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