The Pink Light
Lin de Mol
2 June – 8 July, 2023
Nature Nature
Lin de Mol and Merijn Bolink
2021
Pioneer
Lin de Mol 2017
Artist Statement Pioneer
My work encompasses photography, film, sculptures, drawings and installations. I conceptualize emotional experience to intertwine the personal with the universal.
In other words: I look for the personal in the bigger picture.
I have been an artist all my life. I guess it is all I know; reflecting a state of being, of being here, alive.
I was born and raised in Amsterdam, studied at the Rietveld Academy and the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, followed by filmstudies in the USA. I lived in Antwerp, Ireland and the USA. My work has been shown internationally and is part of Dutch and Italian art collections.
Since 2014 I have been living in Sweden. The deep contrasts and the silence of the nordic landscape have had a profound effect on my work. In the body of work made between 2015 and now, the ‘color’ white is a central and independent entity, indicating a state of mourning and a deep sense of transience after the loss of my brother in 2014.
The title work for this book is the self portrait “Pioneer”. It calls forth a strong and heroic image, yet the work itself shows a vulnerable woman, hurdled in blankets and carrying a fragile stick, with a clumsy balloon attached to it. But the stick is the stem of a young birch tree, in the northern hemisphere also known as the Pioneer Tree. It is the first tree to reappear after disaster, like a fire or severe woodcutting. Using the birch as a pole, the woman carries her balloon like a luminous orb; Vulnerable, cold, and determined.
The sound of a humming bee
Lin de Mol 2015
THE SOUND OF A HUMMING BEE
The eclectic work of Lin de Mol encompasses sculpture, photography and drawing. A broad gesture, not only of practice, but also of content. Signs of domesticity, a rug, a chair, a piece of wallpaper, combine with ease alongside photoworks in which she makes her own luminaries. It is the very large and the very small, and somewhere in between, an emotional, human reality.
Barely visible, but unmistakable there, are the strings from which orbs hang suspended in the landscape. They don´t spoil the illusion. On the contrary, they are the human measure in an otherwise magical landscape in which the artist tries to get a grip on the elusive. Or is it the unattainable? In the series ¨For the Love of Gorse¨, the bright yellow suns made of gorsepetals are hung in the impenetrable bushes that are so characteristic of the Irish landscape, where she regularly goes to make work. The wind picks them up and flings them in the direction of a crow that is just about to fly out of the image. One odd black sun stands out in the bush. It is a small eclipse in a landscape that is now charged with a story for which she has provided the ingredients, but leaves up to us to tell.
The heavenly bodies in Lin de Mols photos are counteracted by the microscopic marine organisms that she draws in her collages. Even though neither of these contrasting things are part of our daily lives, they are a way for her to give herself and us, a place in the bigger picture of our existence. In these miniatures, the possibilities to explore that thought, seem limitless. The white space of the paper acts as an inverted miniature universe in which an explosion on a perceptable scale can take place. A tiny Bang instead of a big one.
The basis is always the ink, as the raw substance of a drawing. A drop, a stroke or a swipe. Here too is chance the first move, like the birth of a universe. This is countered by the detailed jellyfish, corals and cells, drawn with green, red and blue Bic ballpoints, a characteristic of all de Mols drawings. The stitched-in yarns, in identical colours, form a continuation of lines that sometimes exceed the edges of the paper, allowing the works to enter the three-dimensional. This need for the tactile reveals her background as a sculptor, a medium she has recently returned to.
In these sculptures, the first she has made in a long time, de Mol makes radical combinations of the domestic with the natural, even moving on into the supernatural. It is as if she is saying: We can no longer pretend that we human beings, nor our societies, are as important as we think we are. That there are other bigger forces, far beyond our control, at work underneath the surface. It is as if she is telling us: “Let´s put things in a different, higher perspective.”
