Carcinogenic in the IJmond area, sickening for the artist. However, the black dust on the canvas is a blast to the audience's eye. On Saturday May 14th in the year 2022 the exhibition Flora Tata Metallica opens at TORCH Gallery with a new series of works by artist TINKEBELL.
For a year, TINKEBELL. regularly visited the dunes of Wijk aan Zee, right next to the controversial Tata Steel factory. Here she shoveled sand and collected flowers and plants: the basic material for Flora Tata Metallica. She then went through the sand with a magnet almost daily for hours on end to extract the fine and coarse dust from that factory. Painstaking work.
But the truly troubling part of the process came afterwards, while blowing the huge amounts of black Tata dust over the flowers she draped on canvas. Inhaling the particulates that also float through the air in Wijk aan Zee gave TINKEBELL. regular headaches, nausea, dizziness and frequent nosebleeds.
This is typical of the artist's working method: doing everything to tell a story that needs to be told without making any concessions. In Flora Tata Metallica, TINKEBELL, with direct consequences for her own health, makes an extreme amount of harmful emissions painfully visible through the negative prints, made completely in Tata dust, of flora that still survive in the heavily polluted area around the factory.
A hideous story, beautifully depicted.
About the artist
TINKEBELL. (1979, Goes) is (currently) saving the world. She researches frictions in our norms: how we behave, how we live, how we connect with each other; our position towards animals, the environment, the future of our food, phosphate issues, (social) media, refugee frames, politics, the clothing industry, multiculturalism, communication difficulties, the spreading of (fake) news, everything related to Fukushima and more. TORCH has worked together with TINKEBELL. since 2004, when she graduated from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Since then she has worked, published and exhibited across the globe. She is Het Parool's favourite columnist.
TINKEBELL. wants to thank Van der Valk Hotel Amsterdam Zuidas for their generosity. Also, she's grateful that FrisseWind.nu got her engaged in the matter.