Jesse Blaauw is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Amsterdam, where they currently attend a master's in Fine Arts at Sandberg Institute. They graduated with a Bachelor's in Fine Arts in 2022 from the Willem de Kooning Academy.
Blaauw is fascinated with the ambiguous relation between material and immaterial life. They are invested in understanding, revealing, and inciting processes of embodiment, to synthesize and synchronize the semantics of thinking and feeling. Their practice regards body-mind dualism, as an existential objective: holding the core belief that it is through our continuous exchange with non-self, that one may grow and transform. Through the integration of somatic composition throughout their practice: inhaling, exhaling, ingesting, excreting, folding, and unfolding - they emphasize the cruciality of materiality, site-specificity, and identity inquiry in hyper-subjective meta-modern discourse.
The body of their work consists of sculptures, writings, interventions, and two-dimensional works, which all seemingly belong to chapters, and emanate from passaging through them - Touch(ed)(2021), Before - Embrace(2022), to Plunge(2022/2023), to My Fruit Is Your Fruit(2023), Matter Matter (2023/2024) and I, a Porous Site, A Seed(ongoing). Their visual work corresponds to their writing practice, which consists of obsessive (self + non-self) analysis, and critical engagements with ethics and aesthetics. In the materialization of their work, they prioritize the blurring of borders between concept and aesthetic, text and context, leading to a visual language that is characterized by cyclical symbolism, hollow shapes, anthropomorphic bodies, extended mutualisms, and dirt as flesh.
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