ABOUT MY WORK
Femke Gerestein
Aug 2024 (updated June 2026)


My work is an ongoing exploration of the place of my body on and in the world. Each work is preceded by a performance. Unlike a public moment, this is an intimate moment shared by me with the landscape. My large-format detailed drawings and prints (of the body directly onto paper) in which these moments are captured can be seen as an archive of performance documentation. 
A recurring movement in my work is the fall. In the repetition of falling, I search for the intensity of the moment and for ways to capture these moments. Moments in which I merge with the world around me and time stands still. Moments full of hope and possibilities, as well as dangerous places in a precarious balance on the brink of disappearing into nothingness. The body, my body, is in my work the medium for transformation, the place where the everyday world of time and space gives way to another world. When I touch the ground, when the surface of my body makes contact with the surface of the earth, I am bounded, defined once again.

DRAWING AND PERFORMANCE REGISTRATION
My performative actions previously served my drawings. In recent years, this has changed. The performances are increasingly becoming self-contained, and the notion of what drawing means to me is shifting.

LIMITATION 
A few years ago, a curator friend introduced me to the early 20th-century drawings of neurons in the brain by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. As long as the brain remains a mystery, the universe — the reflection of the brain's structure — will also remain a mystery, Cajal states. My brain processes information differently than the brain of a neurotypical person. This manifests itself in many aspects of my work (process). In building an image from the details, for example. In the capacity to focus on the act of drawing for many hours at a time. And in the themes of my work: my neurodivergence creates a specific kind of distance from the world and from my body. My proprioception (literally: self/self-perception) is out of balance. The ability to perceive the position of my body and of body parts is impaired. Only in brief moments, especially in (firm) contact with something (or someone) outside of me, do I feel my limit. These are the moments I seek out in my work. 
My work stems from personal motivations. At the same time, it addresses existential questions that transcend the personal. Questions that are of great importance to me to ask in today's rapidly changing, uncertain, and unsafe world. Where is my home? How do I bridge the gap between me and the world, between me and my body? By nature, man is a stranger to himself. He is not at home in the world as an animal is, but must shape his environment.

BODY, SURFACE, AND TOUCH 
My documentation follows the movement I have made in my work over the past few years in relation to the surface: the paper, my skin, and the ground. In earlier work (2018/2019), I concentrate on the fall. In these graphite drawings, I focus on the fleeting moment preceding the landing: the moment my body is detached from the ground. In two other large-format drawings in which I explore the boundaries of figuration, I dive into the surface. Subsequently, I move beneath the surface and involve it in the action. For all these works, I capture my performative actions with a camera. I develop a selection of photographs into drawings. 
In other work, I record my movements directly in graphite. I rub my skin with graphite powder and throw myself onto the paper on the floor. This work comes into being the moment my skin touches the paper. At first, the touch is still gentle; in later work, it becomes increasingly extreme, harder, and more obsessive. With this method, I place myself in a tradition of artists who use the body as material for drawing, painting, and sculpting: Yves Klein, for example, and Kazuo Shiraga, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Lydia Schouten, Rebecca Horn, and Alexandra Engelfriet. 
I continue the rolling movement from the 'print sessions' in recent work. In this, I no longer roll over paper, but over the ground in the outside world. I seek out my limits, plow with my body through snow-covered fields, dewy furrows, and cornfields, and in doing so, leave tracks on my skin. The landscape over and within which I move grows ever larger, and the body becomes ever smaller.

TIME AND DETAIL IN THE DRAWING 
The repetition of a movement is a constant in my work. In 2018, I had a residency at the Pumping Station in Den Helder. I let myself fall thousands of times in and around the Pumping Station, with my camera as the sole spectator. In a logbook, I wrote down what the falling did to me: how it made me wobble, how it caused me to lose control. This experience is part of the work; that is why I am always the one performing the performances myself. A selection of photographs forms the basis for large-format graphite drawings. I selected photos in which the tension in the body is visible. In the drawing, my body is not overtly feminine, but rather genderless. This recurs in much of my work. The body becomes impersonal because my face is not recognizable. I wore a gas mask while falling because I had rubbed my skin with graphite powder. Although the fall was not intended to create an imprint on the ground, the ritual of covering the body with graphite remained important. Only in recent work do I allow my face to appear recognizably in the image. 
I worked on each of these drawings for three to four months. Time is part of the work. Although the moment I captured in the photo was actually very brief, in my perception it stretched far. It was as if time stood still and I could feel everything in that moment, was completely "switched on". I incorporate the intensity of the moment, and especially the experience of it, into the drawing. Repetition is important here as well. Drawing is a performance that I take up every day. I set up a grid that allows me to focus on the details without losing the overview. Drawing puts me in a state that, for me, is very much like meditation.

SCALE, MATTER, AND SPACE 
For the two graphite drawings Covered (mountain rocks) and Covered (river rocks), I covered my body with heavy stones from the surroundings. The body becomes part of it, is like a stone. The weight of the stones is recognizable and palpable to the viewer. In the two large-format drawings, my body is almost life-sized beneath the stones and lies centered in the image. The Covered series also contains smaller-format drawings and photographs in which my body is covered by other environmental material, such as lumps of clay in the furrows of a winter-ploughed field. In the entire series, the size and position of the body relative to its surroundings vary. While taking the photographs that led to the drawing Covered (Seaweed), I kept the camera at a greater distance, and the surroundings become relatively large (my body lies beneath seaweed on the boundary between water and stones). In terms of size, posture, and perspective, the body in my work relates to the body of the viewer who ultimately looks at it. The final positioning of the work in the space also plays a part in this. 
In 2023, I was awarded the Vleeshal Art Prize. This entailed a solo exhibition at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art and a collaboration with guest curator Martha Jager. In the exhibition 'Moving Through Thin Places', the scale of the body — mine and that of the visitors — serves as a marker. My goal was a presentation characterized by light, airiness, and transparency. As an artist, I am well acquainted with the exhibition space. This project therefore offered me an optimal opportunity to incorporate the atypical exhibition space into my work process right from the start. When Martha visited me in my studio for the first time, I had already taken the first steps in new developments that I implemented in the exhibition: the use of tracing paper instead of my usual heavy drawing paper, colored pencils instead of graphite, and the presentation off the wall, into the space.

SKIN, VULNERABILITY AND DEMATERIALITY 
In the exhibition, I showed three series. The first series begins immediately upon entering the Vleeshal. These works on paper lie horizontally on platforms that are slightly raised from the floor. The series consists of a recent selection from the Body Prints archive, on which I have effectively been working since 2016. During my residency at Kaus Australis (Rotterdam) that year, I further developed the working method in which this series originates. I cover the surface of my body with graphite powder. After this act, the ritualistic nature of which contributes to the intensity and concentration, I let myself fall onto the paper. By using my body as an extension of my material, I experience my work. The works lay scattered across the floor surface of the Vleeshal like a dance on the ground. That is where they originated. 
“Although the drawings originated from Gerestein’s own body, the works appear almost dematerialized. Due to the transparent nature of the work, the sense of movement is enhanced as the work seems to detach itself from gravity. Consequently, it feels even more like a snapshot. As if, when you blow over the work, the material swirls in all directions and the body dissolves into the space. It makes the works fragile and reveals the human being in all his vulnerability. It is the combination of material, support, light, form, and context that detaches the body from the everyday.” (Sandra Markus)*

SNAPSHOT, LIGHT AND MOVEMENT
In the other two series in the Vleeshal as well, I capture movement and create documents of ‘thin places’** that exist only at the moment of action. These Covered series consist of (colour) pencil drawings on tracing paper. The works hang vertically in the space, floating between ceiling and floor. The viewer moves around the works. The drawing is visible on both sides of the transparent paper and catches the incoming light. Ten small-format drawings form an installation the length of my body. You can only view them properly from close up because they hang intimately in a row, back to back. Over the months, two large-format drawings have grown in my studio to the size the body requires in the work and that is best showcased in the large exhibition space. The drawings and the life-sized bodies within them occupy space and are simultaneously almost non-existent, vulnerable, and intimate. Semi-transparent when you stand in front of them and reduced to a vertical line when you stand next to them: a literal ‘thin place’. 
For the large-format and smaller-format Covered series, I captured my moving body with a camera suspended above me. I projected detailed shots from the Body Prints over me. I moved beneath the projections, in constant contact with the floor of my studio. In the photographs, the contour of my body emerges from the network of lines. The skin of the earth in the preceding Covered series has given way to the surface of my body. The approach to skin texture as a landscape is also present in earlier work. 
The weightlessness, intangibility, and transparency of the projections in the Covered series at the Vleeshal are a reaction to the heavy and hard stones and the ice-cold lumps of clay. The fact that my body could come into motion beneath the projections and that color entered the work was an important starting point for this project. The transparency of the tracing paper harks back to the transparency of the projection. Moreover, to me, this paper closely resembles skin: a common thread running through this exhibition and through all my work.

PERSPECTIVE AND THE CAMERA
In 2023, I started a project that continues into the present. I move through the landscape and capture it in color using a mini-drone that I can control myself. This allows me to carry out the work alone. This aspect is important in all my work. The camera feels like an extension of myself. I view myself from the outside. As a human being, I am my body, I am in my body, and I am outside my body.*** By using the drone, I have been able to achieve an important new shift in perspective. The camera moves detached from the ground, into the air, and can capture my movements from a great distance. 
Every performance captured by the drone is an intimate moment shared by me with the landscape. My work moves between presence and disappearance, control and surrender, and touches upon existential questions about connection, alienation, and being at home. This project comprises (so far) three chapters. After Walcheren and Noord-Beveland, the Verklikkerstrand on the Kop van Schouwen was the location for my registrations in January and February 2026. 

From late 2024 through late 2028, I receive the Basic Grant from the Mondriaan Fund. This text is an adapted version of my application. 

Femke Gerestein
Aug 2024 (adapted June 2026)

* Sandra Markus, 'Was Getekend Femke Gerestein (Vleeshal Middelburg)', 2024, www.sandramackus.nl 
** “Thinness is the point of intersection between the instances of the world as it is, as it was, as it inflects one part upon another in seen and unseen forces”, Mondeen, 2015, quoted in 'Encountering Thin Place in the work of Bill Violia and Ana Medieta', Kate Bell, 2016 
*** Based on Helmuth Plessner's concept of eccentric positionality
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