Wies Roeterdink

Wies Roeterdink is a Dutch London-based artist whose practice encompasses a wide range of artistic mediums from sculpture to performance which engages with the ephemeral and the ambient.

In its impermanent nature, her work is concerned with the transiency of existence, the ephemerality of everyday experience, the impact of incidental light on the composition of architectonic structures, the body as an interface for experience and meaning, as well as destabilisation of dominant concepts of structuring the phenomenal world. To realise these concepts, she turn to processes such as casting using handmade paper, sculpting using reclaimed unfired clay, cyanotypes, and combining bioplastics with printmaking. Their materiality is what fascinates her, it is one which holds many potential forms. In their unfixed state, sculptures are vulnerable to change: the bioplastic cracks, the clay fractures, and the paper pulp dissolve. As such, documentation has consistently played an integral role in her practice.

The impermanence of her sculptural works generates a possibility for a form of sculpture which challenges traditional notions of conservation and permanence. Within her work, she is increasingly trying to acknowledge the various durational and temporal registers of materials in flux. She attempts to hold her work in the speculative phase - not focused on a representational sculpture of a thing, rather she uses materials to interface with immaterial conditions, like duration and light.