To enter a world where time has dissolved and life’s noise has fallen silent, seems to be the invitation by Merel Waagmeester. An invitation to step barefoot into the quiet mystery of life within the things that surround us.
To walk barefoot somewhere is to come into contact the sensitive, with your vulnerability and your resilience.
You become more alert; your sense of touch links with your sight, with your sense of smell… your body lives more intensely, and for a moment you descend into pure being, far beyond all mental speculations.
Her work arises from a desire to participate through open awareness in what is, and to observe the magic of life in its fleeting manifestations with a sense of wonder.
The eye is taken in by the subtle, meditative contemplation of minimal forms. Images that attest to an inner posture, the Taoist stance of wu wei: acting without action, without force. An attitude to life that reverently looks at the beauty of what is, and copes with its fragility, tender and refined.
It is also about the integration of silence as an essential element in the canvas of life.
Silence that creates the condition that allows us to be touched by this beauty. Susceptible to the simplicity of existence, susceptible to the life of things around us and in nature.
Merel Waagmeester’s work acquaints us with a form of ecology. An ecology of the eyes, an ecology of sensitivity, as the French naturalist and writer Jacques Tassin describes in his essay ‘Pour une écologie du sensible’ (Odile Jacob, 2020). According to him, we have become separate from the living world by constantly conceptualizing it, virtualizing it, reducing it to abstractions. This approach becomes a path toward earthing: stepping barefoot onto the earth, making contact, and restoring a place of honor in our lives for simplicity.
By Colette Noël
Merel Waagmeester (1981) lives and works in the Netherlands.
She studied Fine Arts at the Utrecht School of the Art and Design (NL) and photography at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Granada, Spain.
She works mainly analogue and in the darkroom on various fiber based papers. Sometimes the negatives are digitized to work with Japanese Kozo papers. Kozo paper is made from the fibers of the inner bark of the mulberry tree, and emphasizes the softness and modesty of her work.
An ongoing project within her practice is the creation of photograms: for these works, created by the light of the sun, she works with most simple objects she happens to find in nature or in her studio.
With these works, she explores the relationship between material, light and time. A slow process in which founded materials transform to an abstract image.
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