About

_{Tessa R. Groenewoud
(NL)
She lives and works in Belgium.}

E D U C A T I O N

_{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}

O N H E R W O R K

Whilst installation pieces were a predominant means of developing her earlier artistic language, recent years have seen her gradually shift to focusing more distinctly on analogue photography, and embracing the role of artist-photographer. Her work consists of diary-like excerpts, printed as small-scale gelatin silver prints. Materialising these prints in the darkroom is an important part of her process, where images are turned into precious objects so that they may later be presented as such, often in frames that become an integral part of, or emphasize the work.

The source of her pictures are slices of life, captured in the immediate and intimate environment of the artist. 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.

Her work strives to combine the personal with the given, memory with evidence, the sign with the signified, the individual with the whole, the void with substance. It 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.

(Georgia Kokot)