Tessel van der Putte - (Re)Turning Cycles
25 Apr - 27 Apr
Exhibition
Have you ever felt more connected to yourself when you are out in nature?
Re(Turning) Cycles is a soloshow by Tessel van der Putte, that explores how the female gaze can inspire our relationship with the natural world and offer a new understanding of our relatability to it. Playing with non-linear perspectives, the exhibition looks at how “the feminine”—that which is always creating and transforming—is an embodied experience by both humans and landscape.
Physically engage with the paintings
Blurring the boundaries between figures and space, women and water, Tessel’s paintings show female figures holding one another in intimate embraces, simultaneously vulnerable and strong. With recurring symbols—water jugs, apples, snakes, flowers, and seeds—her work draws from iconographic feminine allegories, while the circular rotating paintings depict embodied meditations on what it means to experience the world in cycles.
Inviting visitors to physically engage with these paintings by ritually turning them evokes a sense of fluidity in perspective and transformation inherent to such cycles.
“In the beginning... [there] was a very female sea.
For two-and-a-half billion years on Earth, all life forms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean – nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. Charles Darwin believed the menstrual cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea.”~ Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother
About Tessel van der Putte
Tessel has a background in human rights and has published several researches on sea-level rise and the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities—especially women—which has shaped the thematics of her art practice. Interested in the role and our perspective of “the feminine” in society and rooted in ecofeminist thought, she creates expressive and intimate depictions of the female body. Always in close relationship with another body —whether human or with the more-than-human world— her paintings elevate characteristics of nurture, softness, transformation, destruction, and mutual dependence as important insights to finding our place —and equilibrium— in this fast-changing world.