Visual artist Mariken Wessels (1963) studied acting at the Amsterdam Theater School. After a decade-long acting career during the 1990s, she studied visual art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, before establishing an independent artist’s practice. Her work comprises photography, video, as well as installation, sculpture and artists books. Her artistic vision has been shaped by her experiences in theater. She works with scenes and scenography, roleplay and character building. Multilayered projects interweave appropriated imagery and self-produced images to reimagine relationships between, for example, the public and private spheres or fiction and non-fiction. In recent years, the role of bodily expressions has become more prominent, mainly imagined through ceramic work, photography, collage and video.
The series Mama and The Sculptor and the standalone sculpture The Chosen One continue the artist’s quest for the physicality of the body. The sculptures and collages touch upon the attractive power of peeping at other people’s bodies or images of their bodies. The group of sculptures titled Mama connects the millennium-old tradition of so-called Venus figurines, usually interpreted as images that symbolize fertility, to present-day pornography-informed erotic imagery. The sculptures show breasts, sometimes morphing into a phallus and erogenous zones. The malleable material of clay has been transformed into something hard and artificial. Wessels develops her own glaze to give the skin of the sculptures a satin-like feel.
In The Sculptor series, Wessels pokes fun at the idea of the supreme male creator. The collages are based on photographs from 1970s porn magazines, from which Wessels cut out the female bodies and replaced them partly with clay, as the primal material for human creation. Both Mama and The Sculptor turn received ideas about the male-female relationship on their head, and poke fun at eroticism and sexuality in the age of algorithms. Wessels’ interpretation of the female body makes it abstract, liberating it from its status as muse to a male imagination. Works from both series have been published in Fruits of Labor (Van Zoetendaal, 2023), a co-publication with artist Ruth van Beek.
A working period as artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Work Center in Oisterwijk (NL) in 2018 and 2019 familiarized Wessels with clay, as a material; she uses it to make sculptures as body-like landscapes in various sizes. Some of these works have been inspired by a sequence from the famous Human and Animal Locomotion photographic studies by Eadweard Muybridge, showing an obese woman standing up from a lying position. It culminated in the book Miss Cox (Fw:Books, 2020), designed by Hans Gremmen, which shows installation views of sculptures, original photographic works of obese bodies floating underwater, as well as studio overviews depicting sketches and sources of inspiration. Photographs, sculptures and a video work from the umbrella project Nude – Arising from the Ground were included in the group exhibition Human After All: Ceramic Reflections in Contemporary Art at Museum Princessehof, Leeuwarden in 2021.
Wessels’ artist book Taking Off. Henry my Neighbor was published in 2015 with Art Paper Editions to wide acclaim. The book was awarded an honorary appreciation at the Leipzig Book Fair (Best Book Design from all over the World, 2016) and won the Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2016), in addition to being included in the selection for Best Book Designs from the Netherlands and Flanders (2015). This artist’s book constitutes the third part of an open trilogy exploring the self-image in amateur photography on the borderline of the public and the private. The earlier two parts are Elisabeth—I want to eat (2008) and Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off (2010).
Taking Off was exhibited in various spatial arrangements at the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam (2016), as solo show at Fotomuseum Antwerp (2016), as part of Photo Oxford (2017), and within the context of the trilogy, as part of a large solo show at the The Hague Museum of Photography (2017).
Wessels’ photographic works and artist’s books have been collected by museums, libraries and private collectors worldwide, among which the Centre Pompidou (Paris), ICP and MoMA (New York), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fotomuseum Den Haag, Fotomuseum Antwerp (Belgium), de Verbeke Foundation (Belgium) en Ampersand Foundation (Johannesburg).