about me
 

About Eveline Kieskamp

 

Based in Bennekom, I create sculptures that exist in the space between historical reverence and contemporary unease. My practice centers on clay (ceramics, primarily) though I remain open to any material that might strengthen an image.

 

Recognizable, figurative forms are my starting point. I borrow the visual language of 16th- and 17th-century portrait painting, the ruff collar, the brocade, the composed pose, and translate it directly into three-dimensional form in clay. But translation is not replication. A painted portrait stays at a surface; a sculpture has volume, weight, an inside that can be acted upon. Through distortion and unexpected addition, I shift these familiar forms out of their original context, so their meaning changes. That reversal, where historical form turns against itself, is where my originality lies.

 

I use historical visual language deliberately, not nostalgically. I believe we must stay aware of where we come from and build forward from what has already been. But the past is never neutral; it carries urgent questions into the present.

 

We live in a time were appearance and status matter enormously. Simultaneously, there is a longing for depth, for what is genuine beneath the layers we present. Yet even that longing (authenticity, vulnerability, inner life) gets absorbed into image, staged and displayed as another form of surface. My work is not about exposing that as false. It is about the search for what is genuinely inner, underneath all the layers, including the layer of presenting our own depth. The standing figure invites you to approach as you would a real person. Form, scale, viewing distance, these are not neutral choices. They perform the theme itself.

 

The slow process of ceramics (building, drying, firing) shapes not just how I work but what the work means. I cannot rush clay. That constraint becomes generative. In my sculptures, slowness translates into presence: figures that require time to walk around, details that reveal themselves only when you move close. The surfaces, painstakingly constructed, are simultaneously being undone by distortion, by additions that break the expected form, by the friction between what is depicted and how it is made. The viewer experiences this tension in real time. This slowness also speaks directly to my recurring themes of transience and impermanence. Each sculpture carries the mark of time, the evidence of making, the weight of material, the awareness that even this permanent form is, in human terms, temporary. In a world of speed and infinite reproduction, the handmade ceramic object insists on its own singularity and mortality.

 

My work uses historical visual language, but it is not about beauty or decoration. The distortions and additions I enact are driven by concept, not tradition. The material choice itself is in service of what the work needs to say. Ceramic art carries something unique: it holds thousands of years of history in its substance while responding directly to the hand, in real time. That double nature allows me to make abstract questions tangible. Vulnerability, the gap between inner and outer self, the cost of status, these are not things I illustrate. They are things the sculpture enacts. The form performs the content. Only ceramic, with its weight, its surface, its capacity for both precision and accident, could do what this work needs to do.

 

Over the past two years, my practice has moved from working almost entirely within my own world to actively seeking dialogue with a wider field. A turning point was my residency at Guldagergaard, the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark. That experience pushed me to be more explicit about what lies beneath an opulent surface, rather than letting surface speak alone. Where my earlier work often stayed close to personal, almost private imagery, I now consciously build in a second layer that invites outside interpretation. Historical symbols carry meaning beyond my own story. My work still arises from within, but I want it to reach further outward.

 

Recognition from the field, selection for the Faenza Prize, a shortlist for the Young Masters Award and the Rothko Museum's Martinsons Award, publication in Mister Motley and Ceramics Monthly has mattered deeply to me. I work quietly, away from the spotlight. These nominations have given me confidence that the direction I'm moving in resonates beyond my studio.

 

I also work with children and teenagers as an art educator in collaboration with the Kröller-Müller museum, leading workshops and projects through schools and cultural institutions. This is integral to my practice: a way of bringing art close to young people and encouraging them to see, question, and make meaning for themselves.

 

My work is driven by the conviction that art matters, that it can move us, unsettle us, and remind us of what it means to be human in a world defined by its impermanence.