Jesse Blaauw is a conceptual and intermediary artist, born in Rotterdam in 2000. They recently graduated with a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Institute and are currently based in Amsterdam. They see their practice as the public unfolding and exercise of in-between being, crossing, and shifting; their works as tokens for cyclical, dialectical, and psychosomatic processes that require vulnerability, heartache, deep psychological searches, reading, and feelings.
They are fascinated by the ambiguating dynamic between material and immaterial life. This leads them to be invested in understanding, revealing, and initiating embodiment processes, to synchronize the semantics of thinking and feeling experimentally. Fundamental to their practice is the belief that everything is ‘always and only in relation’ and that we are therefore always also ‘what we are not’.
Their perspective is intersectional and utilitarian, and they find optimism in drawing parallels between different systems of oppression and subordination to unravel the logic they practice, and imagine an alternative. Their work is aesthetically exploring the spaces in between stable forms as a strategy to undermine systems that depend on their internal opposition, their binary logic, from outside and within.
In their practice, the body takes on the crucial role of bearing intuition, holding a priori knowledge, and revealing our illogical truths. The integration of somatic composition: inhaling, exhaling, ingesting, excreting, folding, and unfolding, emphasizes the necessity of materiality, site-specificity, and identity-inquiry in our hyper-subjective meta-modern discourse.
The corpus of their work consists of sculptures, texts, interventions, and two-dimensional works, which all seemingly belong to chapters and emerge from traversing them. Their practice is cyclical, critical, research-based, and entangled in contemporary philosophy. Their visual work corresponds with their writing practice, which consists of poetic ‘self + non-self’ analysis, and essayistically dives into the subjects of ethics and aesthetics. In the materialization of their work, they prioritize the blurring of boundaries between concept and form, subject and object, text and context, which leads to a visual language characterized by cyclical symbolism, hollow shapes, anthropomorphic bodies, extensive mutualisms, and dirt-as-flesh pieces. From a material framework that intrinsically associates with a concept, they seek out its boundaries to nourish the axis of their practice; to further delve into verges between forms; creating in-between bodies, crossing from both sides, and in flux with their viewer and site.
Substack
Portfolio
