My goal is to create statues that communicate, with universal, socially engaged content. Providing that physical experience in a field of meaning, recognition that provoke at the same time. My work mainly consists of life-size sculptures in which the human body is used as the bearer of meaning: man as allegory.
For me, the corporal provides a frame of reference to show in what way the personal is intertwined with the social and vice versa;
The dialogue between the users of the public area; their personal reality and the cultural, social topicality in relation to my work.
One of the themes I work with is the position/depiction of women, balancing on the intersection of art and society.
Throughout all of Art History, many Venus statues have been created and women have been depicted in many ways. Nowadays, women are both cliché and iconic in the rapid visual culture. ‘My’ Venus statues are an ode to today’s and tomorrow’s women, very recognizable to modern man with a hint of girl power.
Due to the roughness and the reduction of the anatomy of the model to the main lines and shapes, an image is formed that is incomplete, but, due to gaps and holes invokes a tension that transcends the model. During the work process, the work enters several stages. The starting point always is human anatomy, in which the actual presence of the model is essential. The human body acts as translation of the concept.
I translate the place of man as an individual in the tension between personality development / self-glorification mainly by using my own body as a basis.
Movie "Titus Brandsma"
Movie "Dag van de Maker"
Movie "Dag van de Maker"
Sculptures
Everywhere, the whole day long, we are fed, at times overfed, with images. Images as examples to encourage us or warnings to scare us, images that make us feel good, images that upset us. Images that consciously or unconsciously land on our retinas and from which, consciously or unconsciously, we form an image of ourselves.
The first images you receive as a child are mostly those of your parents. You copy and caricaturize them. You play mummies and daddies. The images surrounding you determine the games you play. Depending on whether you are father or mother, you put the kettle on or go out to work. You are a preponderantly strict or caring, happy or oppressed parent. And the older you get the more you question the images your parents hold up to you. More and more you ask yourself whether you want to be like them when you are older, or whether you are going to do things very differently. The images around you form a key reference framework.
The older I became, the more images came into play. As a hungry teenager seeking my own identity I avidly absorbed lots of images. Like many others, I emulated companions of my own age and style icons. I looked at, studied and imitated the pictures of pop and film stars in magazines and on TV. Their mannerisms, their little dances. I spent hours in front of the mirror trying to synthesize the perfect mix of Madonna and Prins, my older sister and my best girlfriend.
But with the years a certain form of saturation set in: images still found their way to me, but no longer affected me so deeply. And this spate of images in every greater quantities and at ever greater speed, I could always easily let flow past. The quest for my own self-image turned increasingly inward. The examples from my puberty had changed into well conserved little types which tried, just like me, to strike an attitude. They no longer served as something to hold onto, but seemed just as unstable as I myself.
The images that still got inside were those that collided violently with me from out of this rapid flow. Images that were supposed to represent my generation. Images of ambitionless part-time feminists, parasite stay-at-home, work-shy mothers, and ambitious fathers not wanting to care. Flocks of powerless, ambitionless, moping humans, lasciviously shaped to the latest trend. On life-sized billboards, selling their bodies for a breazer or dancing half-naked in video clips. My generation of women depicted as empty husks, totally uncoupled from identity and emotion. But what do these empty husks say about me? About my generation? How can you depict people on the outside, without doing justice to what is inside. Without putting across what moves us, what busies us, what tears us up inside or makes us happy.
From time to time, however, there are images that are an exception to the rule. Images that so marvellously depict the Zeitgeist of my generation of women that they touch me as deep inside as did your pop heroes when I was younger. Images that give you something to hold on to, because they do justice to your self-image; fragile and powerful. No pretty, pouting female thing to be gently caressed, but the raw, naked core. Naked and powerful, fragile and magnificent. Tender, questioning, uncertainly seeking, self-confident. Fighting, courting, making love and proud. Energetic and ambitious. Child, mother, wife, protector. For an honest contemporary image of my generation of women, you do not need words. Natasja Bennink’s sculptures speak volumes.
Roos Wouters
Political scientist at the UVA and freelance advertising artist
A WOMAN ON A MISSION
sculptures Natasja Bennink 1999-2009
concept+design Rudo Menge
photography Reyer Boxem
consideration Roos Wouters
poems Maria van Daalen
Publisher Galerie VCR, Antwerpen and BAI, Scholten ISBN 9789085865346
Available at:
Gallery Van Campen & Rochtus, Antwerp phone +32(0)3 2940662, www.galerieVCR.be