Tessa R Groenewoud
(NL)
She lives and works in Belgium.
Master Fine Art, Media Art, KASK & Conservatorium School of Arts
Ghent, Belgium
2014 – 2016
Art Science, Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
2007 – 2008
BA Fine Art, Royal Academy of Art
The Hague, The Netherlands
1998 – 2003
https://www.instagram.com/tessargroenewoud/
Whilst installation pieces were a predominant means of developing her earlier artistic language, in recent years her focus lies more distinctly on analogue photography, embracing the role of artist-photographer. Her work consists of diary-like excerpts, often printed in the dark room as small-scale gelatin silver prints. Her images are turned into precious objects that are presented as such, sometimes in frames that become an integral part of the work.
The source of her pictures are slices of life, captured in her immediate and intimate environment. They spring from everyday scenes of personal life and relationships and show banal details of objects and surfaces, fragments of bodies and interactions, encountered landscapes and familiar spaces. But these images function not only as fixed moments of captured reality -- they reflect just as much on the process of image-making and on the medium of photography itself. References to time and touch are recurrent; the lightness of being, confronted with matter and fixation. A hint of ritual and repetition meeting a poetic concentration — sometimes resulting in near abstract images.
They strive to combine the personal with the given, memory with evidence, the sign with the signified, the individual with the whole, the void with substance. Het work supports the idea that to truly see an image is to actively engage as a viewer, to go beyond its surface, past the periphery of the photograph, to spaces in between, to the things that we miss.