Biography
Mathilde Jansen graduated from the Royal Academy, The Hague (KABK) in 2006, following which she undertook several residencies and exhibited her photography internationally, as well as carrying out commissions for the media as well as for companies and organizations. Her primarily photographic practice seeks the universal value of natural resources and minerals as a means of tracing the complex relationship between people and the global economy. She aims to create new perspectives from which to examine social structures and the connections between the local and global, which, for Jansen, form the basis of human attitudes, social positioning and intercultural communication. In her practice Jansen consciously interweaves market-driven ways of thinking with an integrated holistic vision of nature, teasing out the borders between the two. Using experiments in analogue photography, incorporating awe-inspiring constructions on location and manipulating medium format negatives, she creates a dynamic interplay between subject matter and representation, navigating areas as diverse and all encompassing as nature and ecology, spirit and community.
Mathilde Jansen takes us into a reality of collective wilderness and symbiosis that we see reflected in nature. By means of unique experiments in which analogue photo negatives are manipulated with various inks and fluids she explores a new interaction with invisible networks and living landscapes. In this process, old layers are lost or merged. The layered nature in her work reflects a deeper dimension that we as humans belong to. Jansen’s play with the perception of multidimensionality, shadow, light, solid and translucent forms, moves logical thinking towards a new dynamic.
Jansen is a mother of three daughters, born in 2011, 2021 and 2023. She lives and works in Deventer, where her studio is located in a lush green environment nearby a river and food forest. She portrays both rural as urban, densely populated areas such as the Randstad. Her projects represent an ongoing interplay and interaction between modernisation and wilderness, urbanisation and consciousness.
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“The experience was an exciting one for me. It illustrated that writing was about risk – about risking everything. And that the value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality.”
– Ryszard Kapuściński
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