Biography
Mathilde Jansen graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) in 2006. Following her studies, she undertook several artist residencies and exhibited her photography internationally, while also completing commissions for media outlets, companies, and organizations.
Her primarily photographic practice investigates the universal value of natural resources and minerals as a way of tracing the complex relationships between people and the global economy. Jansen seeks to create new perspectives from which to examine social structures and the connections between the local and the global—connections that, for her, form the basis of human attitudes, social positioning, and intercultural communication. Within her practice, she consciously intertwines market-driven modes of thinking with an integrated, holistic vision of nature, probing the boundaries between the two.
Through experiments in analogue photography, including the construction of site-specific interventions and the manipulation of medium-format negatives, Jansen creates a dynamic interplay between subject matter and representation. Her work navigates expansive fields such as nature and ecology, spirit and community, allowing these dimensions to coexist and inform one another.
Jansen invites the viewer into a reality of collective wilderness and symbiosis, reflected in natural systems. Through unique experimental processes in which analogue photographic negatives are manipulated with various inks and fluids, she explores new forms of interaction with invisible networks and living landscapes. The layered nature of her work reflects deeper dimensions to which humans inherently belong. Her exploration of multidimensionality—through shadow and light, solidity and translucency—shifts logical perception toward a more fluid and dynamic understanding.
In response to the impact of media imagery and dominant economical structures, Jansen’s work positions embodied awareness and inner perception as a regenerative force. Through her practice, she investigates how subtle systems—psychological, ecological, and energetic—interact within and through one another.
Jansen is a single mother of three daughters, born in 2011, 2021, and 2023, and also works as a creative carer for people with disabilities. She lives and works in Deventer, travelling between rural, quiet landscapes and expanding urban environments in the Netherlands and abroad. Her current photographic projects reflect this ongoing interplay between modernisation and wilderness, urbanisation, cultivation 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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