Janne Meijer

My practice is rooted in process, making, repetition, and care. Through drawing, installation, and ceramics, I explore how objects hold memory, stories, and traces of what once was, what is held onto, and what resists disappearance. I engage with domestic spaces of storage, collection, and preservation, both physical and symbolic, through forms like jars, cabinets, and furniture. These are spaces where we hold onto things: inherited china behind glass, a drawer filled with objects we cannot part with yet- artefacts of personal and collective histories.

My ceramic forms, often closed or lidded, suggest containment and secrecy, reflecting on the tension between absence and presence, loss and preservation. Making functional wares connects me to others and the history of craft, grounding my thinking, making and research. I’m interested in the endurance of ceramics: its archaeological significance, role in material culture, and the stories built around these fragments.

Using materials like pencil and Danish oil, I carefully draw places, objects, and embroidery patterns. These drawings act as traces, layering memory and material, obscuring and revealing. By layering materials and incorporating elements that fragment and conceal, my work navigates the tension between searching and hiding, collecting and divesting. Through engaging with objects as vessels of memory, I examine how we preserve, conceal, and construct history through the things we hold onto and the spaces we create for them.