Ien Dobbelaar (Netherlands) Residence: July, 2016
Ien Dobbelaar is a visual artist based in Leiden.
She completed her Bachelors in three dimensional art at Royal Academy of Art The Hague, Den Haag.
The human being in all its aspects frequently appears in Ien’s work.
Power and simplicity are very important; she moves on the boundaries of recognizable and unrecognizable.
Her endeavors are to represent a deeper dimension: watching becomes contemplation. She worked with different materials, such as plaster, steel, fabric. It ranges from small sculptures to installations.
The last years she concentrated on photography and drawing. Subject in her photos are the elderly (the solitude, but also the beauty of the last years of life) often combined with images of small children. The feature of Ien’s photo work is the way she works with her camera: she prefers simple, out-of-focus and often black and white images.
Ien: “A piece of art gets its value by memory, remainders and reflections of a personality. By using simple images and eye-catching details I want to touch the remainders of human life, the left “luggage”.
During her residency in Japan she will react on her own photos with drawings. The surrounding rice fields will be her starting point.
