SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT
RENSKE MARIA VAN DAM
I work at the intersection of art, architecture, and research, engaging the body as a central tool for sensing, questioning, and transforming the built environment. My practice foregrounds movement, breath, and embodied presence as ways of attuning to landscapes—urban or otherwise—and understanding how our bodies and environments co-create and inform one another.
Rather than designing from a distance, I embrace a radically situated approach: hands-on, immersive, and guided by lived experience. This sensorial and participatory method serves as both a playful critique of traditional architectural studios and a call for deeper reciprocity with the spaces we inhabit.
I am drawn to in-between spaces in all their vibrant, messy, and transformative potential. These thresholds—between body and landscape, self and other, inside and outside—are central to my exploration of slow, feminist, and post-western spatial practices. My work invites an expanded awareness of subtle realities and dynamic entanglements, seeking to nurture more reciprocal and caring relationships with the earth.
Multidimensional by nature, my practice spans in-situ intervention, academic research, and community engagement. I cultivate a transformative spatial practice rooted in generosity, care, and cross-cultural dialogue, particularly through the cross-pollination of Asian and Western ways of knowing and making.
PORTFOLIO
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OPEN CALL PULCHRI
WOMAN IN/ OF/ THROUGH THE HAGUE
I would like to take part in the exhibition with one of the following projects:
Radiant Topographies (2025) is a series of paintings inspired by the raw power of geological forces and meditative inner landscapes. Drawing from memories of shifting terrains—natural, urban, and internal—the paintings are crafted with a blend of oil, acrylic, pigment, plaster, metal, and cloth and applied both with bare hands and the precision of a painter’s brush.
In this project I explore the rich and multidimensional concept of memory as an embodied and creative force. While hiking through mountains and wandering through cities, I collect the dynamic qualities of the landscape as felt impressions on my body. Bark of a tree on the skin of my left arm. Wind engraved rocks housing in my chest. Melting glaciers in my bones. Office facades pressing on my back. These blocks of sensation travel with me as memories of other realms. When meditating, I further wander through the highly texturized and colourful landscapes of my expanded consciousness. Playing with energies, structuring my intuitive thoughts, flowing colours generate tactile responses, different breathing patterns, and open a sense of spaciousness in both body and mind. To me, the physical surface of the earth and the mental surface of imagination are two facets of the same world. The body as mediator, twisting concrete and abstract memories into one continuous realm.
I would love to take part in the exhibition with one, or more paintings of these series. Follow the link for exact dimensions of the paintings.
Hymn for the Relational (2025) is a speculative story reconsidering the role of the architect. Through sketches, material samples, and embodied observations, we follow the wanderings of Leia Ningen Hues, an archi-nymph who collaborates with her environment. With the wind, the sun, and the moon as her allies, Leia creates dynamic spaces that insert life in the built environment. Hymn for the Relational is neither theory nor fiction, but an immersive, multifaceted narrative highlighting our capacity to sense the in-between — to perceive, nurture, and craft within what was considered empty.
In this project I further explore the rich and multidimensional concept of memory as an embodied and creative force. Specifically in parts of the story that iterate on the concept of bone memory. I approach this concept both through the eyes of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ tales about La Loba, the bone collector of ancient stories, who restores life through gathering fragments (in the book Woman Who Run with the Wolves), and through the lenses of Stefanie Foo’s understanding as bone memory in the context of healing from intergenerational trauma. (in the book What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma).
In July 2025, a first snippet of this project was published online as part of nomadic artist lab FoAM's Anarchive. In the coming months, I will further develop this project for a printed publication by refining the writing and the sketches to full text and spatial drawings.
If selected for the exhibition, this project requires a remaking towards a gallery format. I am very much interested to explore this path, hope you trust me in this process, and happy to discuss possible medium/formats with the curators.
‘Leia’s story is only the start of a process. Like the bones gathered by La Loba in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ tales, this story awaits animation through shared practice. As readers engage these traces, the story can be whispered from ear to ear, craft to craft, awakening and strengthening intergenerational wisdom in spatial practice.’
SHORT CV
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