Margriet van Weenen – Nature Always Wins

About this activity.

Margriet van Weenen explores in her work the relationship between humankind and the landscape, nature, and the earth. She focuses particularly on the changes taking place in nature—whether or not influenced by human activity—and their consequences for life on earth. The awareness that humans play nothing more than a temporary and subordinate role within the grandeur of nature resonates throughout all her work. Van Weenen draws most of her inspiration from the remote, northern, cold regions where no traces of human culture can be found.

She reworks old photographs or her own images of snow landscapes and icebergs with paint, and then photographs them again, creating entirely new images that hover between figuration and abstraction. This process is her way of processing and personalizing what she experiences in and with nature, transforming it into a kind of visual poetry.

The series ICE AGE IS COMING – Sailing home in conversation with Louise A. Boyd connects to the photographic archive of Louise A. Boyd (1887–1972), an American polar explorer of Greenland and the Arctic. Van Weenen’s series Iceberg page 106 is inspired by a photograph from the book De Planeet Aarde – Gletsjers (Planet Earth – Glaciers), published in Van Weenen’s birth year, 1983. The archival image shows how the “Ice Patrol” once marked the most dangerous icebergs at sea with paint—often a futile act, since icebergs constantly change in shape and size.

Margriet van Weenen (1983) studied at Academie Minerva and the Frank Mohr Institute. She lives and works in Noordhorn.

Museum Belvédère.

Location.

Museum Belvédère
Oranje Nassaulaan 12
8448 MT Heerenveen
www.museumbelvedere.nl/nl/