Digital Issue 19: Hanneke van Leeuwen – ODE

Excerpt taken from Paper Journal Digital Issue 19, available to download now.

What binds van Leeuwen’s works together here are intertwining threads of form and feeling, movement and gesture, history and culture both personal and shared, as well as an overarching preoccupation with the ways that womanhood has always been represented and explored. In some images, she reduces the bodies of women to mere sculptural matter, cutting out and collaging them into altered forms, while in others, figures appear like classical statues, dreamlike and captivating, as if echoing some distant past. 

Elsewhere, photographs of women are interspersed with clusters of flowers still rooted in the ground, and figurative black and white female nudes are hollowed out to reveal the abstract spaces inside of them. Sometimes faces are obscured completely, and other times they are seen staring directly back at themselves.

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