Artist:
Awoiska van der Molen
Title:
Thousands a Second a Year
Year:
2021
Adress:
Thousands a Second a Year
Website:
www.intonature.net:
In Awoiska van der Molen's (The Netherlands, 1972) photographic work, nature is eternal, untouchable, and above all, elemental. She regularly travels to remote areas in Europe, Japan and Mexico to seek out isolation there. Here, for Into Nature, she is returning to her roots, the northern Netherlands, having been raised in the city of Groningen, close to the German moors from which her distant ancestors hailed. Her work is about what is not visible but can be felt, the physical experience of being in nature. Van der Molen says: "When you spend a long time alone in a quiet landscape, far away from the hectic modern world, our deepest intuition recognizes our original territory: unspoiled nature, with its rhythms on which the physical system is built”. Only when Van der Molen experiences this, does she take her camera out of her bag, which she did often in the case of the Bargerveen.
To emphasize the intangible connection with the nature of the Bargerveen, Van der Molen has printed her photographs on glass, so that the image and the existing natural environment flow into one another, as it were. And although we see here 'the Bargerveen on the Bargerveen' and are thus clearly connected to a place, we see more than that: a horizon behind the horizon, a mysterious reflection over the landscape, similar to so-called Witte Wieven, patches of fog, regularly floating by in the Drenthe landscape.
Vertaling
In het fotowerk van Awoiska van der Molen is de natuur eeuwig, onaantastbaar en vooral elementair. Normaliter reist vooral naar afgelegen gebieden in Europa, Japan en Mexico om daar het isolement op te zoeken. Nu, voor Into Nature, keerde ze terug naar haar wortels: de noordelijke Nederlanden, waar ze opgroeide in de stad Groningen, dichtbij het Duitse veengebied vanwaar haar verre voorouders stammen. Haar werk gaat over wat niet zichtbaar, maar wel voelbaar is: de lichamelijke ervaring van het zijn in de natuur. Van der Molen: ‘Wanneer je een langere tijd alleen in het stille landschap verblijft, ver weg van de hectische moderne wereld, dan herkent onze diepste intuïtie ons oorspronkelijke territorium: de ongerepte natuur, met haar ritme waarop het lichamelijk systeem gebouwd is’. Pas wanneer Van der Molen dit ervaart, haalt ze haar camera uit haar tas. Zo ook in het Bargerveen.
Om de niet tastbare verbinding met de natuur van het Bargerveen te benadrukken printte Van der Molen haar foto’s op glas waardoor het beeld en de bestaande natuur als het ware in elkaar overvloeien. En hoewel we hier ‘het Bargerveen rgerveen’ zien en dus duidelijk verbonden zijn aan een plek, zien we méér dan dat: een horizon achter de horizon, een mysterieuze weerschijn over het landschap, als witte wieven die voorbijtrekken.
www.awoiska.nl:
Since the start of my artistic practice seventeen years ago (at first photographing in urban settings, then more and more drifting into natural wilderness), my aim has always been to try to get as close as possible to some true, unspoilt core of a place. By peeling off all the many layers of today’s roaring world, I slowly eliminate all distractions in order to hear, see and experience my surroundings with clean senses. Due to cascading technological revolutions, our society has evolved enormously over the last few centuries. Our bodies however, have not evolved at the same pace, and we suffer when we are cut off from nature. Yet even as we are engulfed in this modern world, I believe that the human body possesses some deep internal memory, an unconscious instinct, that recognizeswe get closer to the kind of place from which we stem: the uncorrupted territory of nature. The experience of this return is what I seek to visualise through my images.
My black-and-white photographs of mountains, forests or bodies of waters thus become abstract representations of anonymised landscapes, the result of my urge to return to our origin. Making my photographs, I spend long periods of time in remote areas – in absolute solitude – so as to allow nature to imprint its specific emotional qualities on me. Only a few images travel back with me to be hand-printed in the dark room. Without titles or any indications as to their locations, the large-scale silver gelatin prints recreate my experiences of these secluded natural worlds, erasing boundaries of time and space between the viewer and the source.
Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition theminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world.
www.awoiska.nl:
Awoiska van der Molen (1972) is a Dutch visual artist, photography as her main tool. Her black and white images are abstract representations of anonymised landscapes that are the result of her urge to return to the place from which we stem: the uncorrupted territory of nature.
In 2019 Van der Molen was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability. This exhibition with the theme 'Hope' is touring world wide until 2021.
In 2017 her work was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and was she the recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award 2017. Van der Molen was awarded the Japanese Hariban Award in 2014 and was finalist at the Hyères Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in France in 2011. Her first monograph ‘Sequester’ was nominated for the Paris Photo / re First Book Prize in 2014 and it received Silver Medal for ‘Best Books from all over the World’ in Leipzig, Germany.
Van der Molen studied Architecture & Design followed by photography at Minerva Art Academy Groningen and Hunter City University in New York. In 2003 she completed her MFA in Photography at the St. Joost Academy in Breda, Netherlands.
www.wikipedia.org:
Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places. Van der Molen has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Prix Pictet, and her work is held in the collections of the Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Between 2000 and 2003, she made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the of the city.
Since 2009 Van der Molen has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. Her first book, Sequester (2014), "photographed throughout the whole of Europe" including the volcanic Canary Islands, contains monochromatic "landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [...] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey".Blanco (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees. The Living Mountain (2020) is "a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit." Sean O'Hagan and Jörg Colberg have praised the quality of her prints
In Awoiska van der Molen's (The Netherlands, 1972) photographic work, nature is eternal, untouchable, and above all, elemental. She regularly travels to remote areas in Europe, Japan and Mexico to seek out isolation there. Here, for Into Nature, she is returning to her roots, the northern Netherlands, having been raised in the city of Groningen, close to the German moors from which her distant ancestors hailed. Her work is about what is not visible but can be felt, the physical experience of being in nature. Van der Molen says: "When you spend a long time alone in a quiet landscape, far away from the hectic modern world, our deepest intuition recognizes our original territory: unspoiled nature, with its rhythms on which the physical system is built”. Only when Van der Molen experiences this, does she take her camera out of her bag, which she did often in the case of the Bargerveen.
To emphasize the intangible connection with the nature of the Bargerveen, Van der Molen has printed her photographs on glass, so that the image and the existing natural environment flow into one another, as it were. And although we see here 'the Bargerveen on the Bargerveen' and are thus clearly connected to a place, we see more than that: a horizon behind the horizon, a mysterious reflection over the landscape, similar to so-called Witte Wieven, patches of fog, regularly floating by in the Drenthe landscape.
Vertaling
In het fotowerk van Awoiska van der Molen is de natuur eeuwig, onaantastbaar en vooral elementair. Normaliter reist vooral naar afgelegen gebieden in Europa, Japan en Mexico om daar het isolement op te zoeken. Nu, voor Into Nature, keerde ze terug naar haar wortels: de noordelijke Nederlanden, waar ze opgroeide in de stad Groningen, dichtbij het Duitse veengebied vanwaar haar verre voorouders stammen. Haar werk gaat over wat niet zichtbaar, maar wel voelbaar is: de lichamelijke ervaring van het zijn in de natuur. Van der Molen: ‘Wanneer je een langere tijd alleen in het stille landschap verblijft, ver weg van de hectische moderne wereld, dan herkent onze diepste intuïtie ons oorspronkelijke territorium: de ongerepte natuur, met haar ritme waarop het lichamelijk systeem gebouwd is’. Pas wanneer Van der Molen dit ervaart, haalt ze haar camera uit haar tas. Zo ook in het Bargerveen.
Om de niet tastbare verbinding met de natuur van het Bargerveen te benadrukken printte Van der Molen haar foto’s op glas waardoor het beeld en de bestaande natuur als het ware in elkaar overvloeien. En hoewel we hier ‘het Bargerveen rgerveen’ zien en dus duidelijk verbonden zijn aan een plek, zien we méér dan dat: een horizon achter de horizon, een mysterieuze weerschijn over het landschap, als witte wieven die voorbijtrekken.
www.awoiska.nl:
Since the start of my artistic practice seventeen years ago (at first photographing in urban settings, then more and more drifting into natural wilderness), my aim has always been to try to get as close as possible to some true, unspoilt core of a place. By peeling off all the many layers of today’s roaring world, I slowly eliminate all distractions in order to hear, see and experience my surroundings with clean senses. Due to cascading technological revolutions, our society has evolved enormously over the last few centuries. Our bodies however, have not evolved at the same pace, and we suffer when we are cut off from nature. Yet even as we are engulfed in this modern world, I believe that the human body possesses some deep internal memory, an unconscious instinct, that recognizeswe get closer to the kind of place from which we stem: the uncorrupted territory of nature. The experience of this return is what I seek to visualise through my images.
My black-and-white photographs of mountains, forests or bodies of waters thus become abstract representations of anonymised landscapes, the result of my urge to return to our origin. Making my photographs, I spend long periods of time in remote areas – in absolute solitude – so as to allow nature to imprint its specific emotional qualities on me. Only a few images travel back with me to be hand-printed in the dark room. Without titles or any indications as to their locations, the large-scale silver gelatin prints recreate my experiences of these secluded natural worlds, erasing boundaries of time and space between the viewer and the source.
Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition theminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world.
www.awoiska.nl:
Awoiska van der Molen (1972) is a Dutch visual artist, photography as her main tool. Her black and white images are abstract representations of anonymised landscapes that are the result of her urge to return to the place from which we stem: the uncorrupted territory of nature.
In 2019 Van der Molen was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet, the global award in photography and sustainability. This exhibition with the theme 'Hope' is touring world wide until 2021.
In 2017 her work was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and was she the recipient of the Larry Sultan Photography Award 2017. Van der Molen was awarded the Japanese Hariban Award in 2014 and was finalist at the Hyères Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in France in 2011. Her first monograph ‘Sequester’ was nominated for the Paris Photo / re First Book Prize in 2014 and it received Silver Medal for ‘Best Books from all over the World’ in Leipzig, Germany.
Van der Molen studied Architecture & Design followed by photography at Minerva Art Academy Groningen and Hunter City University in New York. In 2003 she completed her MFA in Photography at the St. Joost Academy in Breda, Netherlands.
www.wikipedia.org:
Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places. Van der Molen has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Prix Pictet, and her work is held in the collections of the Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Between 2000 and 2003, she made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the of the city.
Since 2009 Van der Molen has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. Her first book, Sequester (2014), "photographed throughout the whole of Europe" including the volcanic Canary Islands, contains monochromatic "landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [...] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey".Blanco (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees. The Living Mountain (2020) is "a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit." Sean O'Hagan and Jörg Colberg have praised the quality of her prints