ARTIST IN RESIDENCE – BERNICE NAUTA

06.08.-10.09.2021

Bernice Nauta (1991) makes installations comprising drawings, paintings, objects, short films and stories. The installations are portraits of characters that often operate on the border between fact and fiction, visible and invisible. Often they relate to the figure of the trickster. The works function as fragments or traces that tell something about the ambiguous identity of the character. Nauta is interested in how identity is constructed and how multiple roles exist within an individual.

"At NIKI I am working on a new series of objects and paintings that started from the spiderweb, a beautiful trick invented to catch things. The nice thing about the spiderweb is that it’s setting out a trap, not knowing what will end up inside of it. It’s basically like the fishing net. Sometimes twigs, leaves or dust end up in the web, and the spider cleans it. Other times a bug flies into it, and it's a great catch. I try to appropriate this method in the paintings. I try to work with things that I ‘find’; motifs, gestures and ideas to the works that have caught my attention. To me an important part of this phase of the painting was to somehow not be judgmental and use a kind of non-identity-mode of thinking (or ‘thinking-without-a-head’). Secondly, just like the spider does, I enter the web and check what’s there, sometimes realizing that it’s something that has to be cleaned up, other times it is a good catch. The works result into webs of ideas. This brought me also to do small string figure sculptures, in which I’m also catching ideas." Bernice Nauta