Secret mountain - An imaginary hike
Margriet van Weenen (1983) The Netherlands. Studied BA Visual Arts Academie Minerva and MFA Advanced Painting at the Frank Mohr institute lives and works in Groningen. She works in various media, such as photography, painting, collage and sculpture. Within a theme she researches objects and photographs, on their history, context or appearance. Van Weenen makes installations of works that originate in the (natural)history museum or photo archives. She takes the existing image to her studio and from there the intense process of making starts. She searches, collects, photographs, copies, cuts, paints, prints, sculpts. During her process, the context of an installation freezes the moment of process and search, afterwards the process continuous.
An Important theme in her work is the duality between materialization and the metaphysical. The construction and deconstruction of our society and the preservation of our history. The tension between temporality and the urge to conserve. Her installations have a strong resemblance with historical museum presentations, where objects are shown from their function and context.
Lately her interest shifts more to nature and landscape. Based on her collection of (vintage) photographs and archival finds, the site-specific installation Secret Mountain, an imaginary hike evokes a journey through a fictional landscape, using painting, collage, photography and ceramics.