From April 19 through May 17 Mariëtte van der Ven will exhibit new pieces of sculpture. Following her artist-in-residence period in Jingdezhen, China, in the project Terra in China – China in Terra, she experienced how a stay in foreign climes offered the chance to reconsider her own work.
In addition to working in clay, Mariëtte also turned to sculpture. She has combined porcelain with wood, which has given her new possibilities to find novel forms and expand the expressive potential of her work. Mariëtte: ‘Wood is a magnificent material that combines well with porcelain. With wood, you remove something and that is irreversible, so supreme concentration is required. Working in porcelain you can add something, and then take it away again.’
‘Actually, I make poetry but then in a spatial form; I rearrange existing forms until they express what I mean to say.’ The source of inspiration for her pieces can be found in emotions such as fervor, anger, powerlessness and guilt: feelings that can bring people to a state in which reason loses out to emotion.
Mariëtte wants to capture the human psyche, sometimes referring to images which we already know and other times creating new forms, searching for the ultimate form for the emotion that it should express and searching for the answer to the question “Why do people become who they are?”