Bianca Severijns just isn’t your typical up to date artist. Her canvas isn’t conventional, her brushes are unconventional, and her medium — paper — is each delicate and daring, providing an intricate platform for her artistic expression. Severijns, born within the Netherlands and now based mostly in Israel, has developed a singular visible language by way of paper, crafting it into advanced, layered works that contact on profound human experiences and feelings. Her journey with paper is as a lot about private exploration as it’s about creating artwork that resonates on a common degree.
Severijns’ inventive journey started with a deep fascination for the pure world and its cycles. As she delved deeper into her work, her focus shifted from nature to the broader themes of human displacement and social points. The medium of paper turned a vital a part of this exploration. “In my arms and between my fingers, paper appears like a superpower medium that permits me to convey my inventive imaginative and prescient with a combination of seriousness with whimsy, summary with the concrete, and the non-public with the common,” Severijns explains. This assertion encapsulates her method, mixing contrasting components to create a harmonious, thought-provoking physique of labor.
In my arms and between my fingers, paper appears like a superpower medium that permits me to convey my inventive imaginative and prescient with a combination of seriousness with whimsy, summary with the concrete, and the non-public with the common.
Severijns’ selection of paper as a medium just isn’t arbitrary. The artist views paper as a cloth embodying dualities— fragility and energy, vulnerability and energy.
“Paper is as susceptible, fragile, and humble as a cloth, as it’s sturdy, decisive, and highly effective! For me, paper is a cloth that may be freely labored, with an infinite quantity of prospects and challenges,” she says. This duality is mirrored in her works, the place hand-torn paper items are meticulously organized into tapestries, murals, and reliefs that talk to the complexities of human expertise.
Severijns’ exploration of displacement, a recurring theme in her work, attracts from her personal life experiences. Shifting from the Netherlands to Israel was a major and difficult transition, a voluntary uprooting that nonetheless got here with its personal set of difficulties. This expertise of making a brand new residence in a international land laid the groundwork for her artwork, which frequently explores the themes of uprooting and re-rooting, each actually and metaphorically. Her early works centered on the pure cycles of displacement, drawing parallels between the phases of nature and human circumstances similar to pressured migration and the seek for belonging.
As a up to date paper artist, my artwork is a bodily illustration of my ongoing reflective journey. It’s paper artwork, molded by intuition and an mind influenced by instinct.
As her work developed, the artist started to delve deeper into the social implications of displacement, inspecting the elemental wants of displaced folks. This shift is especially evident in her more moderen works, similar to these featured on the 2019 Venice Biennale within the “Private Buildings – Identities” exhibition. Right here, she offered a wall set up of two giant protecting blankets, utilizing them as metaphors to convey the essential human rights and wishes for safety, safety, and freedom. These blankets, constructed completely of paper, weren’t simply artwork items however highly effective statements on the human situation.
“As a up to date paper artist, my artwork is a bodily illustration of my ongoing reflective journey. It’s paper artwork, molded by intuition and an mind influenced by instinct,” she displays. Every of her artworks begins with pristine white paper, which she then transforms into one thing completely new — a course of that mirrors life’s complexities and transformations.
Severijns’ artwork demonstrates the ability of paper, able to conveying deep emotion and sophisticated concepts by way of its delicate but resilient nature. Her work is a multi-dimensional journey, one which invitations viewers to discover not simply the artwork itself, however the profound human experiences it represents. Via her paper artwork, Severijns continues to push boundaries, difficult our perceptions of each the medium and the message it carries.
