Larisa Sjoerds is an artist, museum guide and visual arts teacher. As a visual artist her favorite medium currently is ink combined with all sorts of obvious media such as pencil, felt-tip pen, fine liners, ballpoint, acrylic paint, and crayon, but also less obvious media such as silverleaf, salt and other substances which influence the consistency of ink. Larisa’s drawings visualize abstracted human figures in a surreal world. Her drawings are literally inspired by shapes and patterns of cells in the human body and other fauna and flora, but they are never just a copy of those existing shapes and patterns.
“Our emotions and instincts can be very disturbing and intriguing at the same time. They influence and can even possess our lives. Somewhere deep down in our body a variety of processes is taking place. Such as the beating of a heart, an ovulation, impulsive thoughts to do with fear, sexual or violent actions. These mostly hidden processes, thoughts, emotions, and instincts are what I want to or would like to visualize. The creative development of this visualization is partly rational and partly as organic and intuitive as the (dis)functioning of our brain and our body.
Circle of Life (2024) is a series of 10 works, it describes, illustrates, the contradictions in life on how to be/stay/become smart, young, strong, beautiful, healthy. While we are escape artists; by drinking alcohol, eating junk-food, watching ‘the socials’, doing jobs we don’t like, staying in square boxes, surrounded by chemicals in our water and plastic particles in our bodies. We are walking contradictions in a world full of contradictions. Contradiction is at the heart of being human. Which contradictions are controlling your life and how can you use them to your advantage?
Mediation as a profession - As a freelance museum guide and educational developer Larisa Sjoerds is using a variety of interactive mediating techniques for several art museums in The Netherlands. The objective is to encourage step-by-step dialogues while observing art individually or with a group and to become aware of our frames of reference. The use of language, drawing, poetry, performance, and sound are part of the toolkit to exercise and expand visual literacy and the art of observation. This type of art mediation is part of an ongoing research by Larisa Sjoerds and is also on offer regularly as a training for teachers and museum guides. In her most recent educational projects for museums for secondary school students, facts and fiction around the terms value and appreciation are discussed in relation to art and visual culture in general. She also recently designed a hands-on drawing guide for (young) adult visitors of an art museum to be used self-guided or during a drawing tour.
Below
a select impression of works and details from works by Larisa Sjoerds. For further
information and an up to date overview of available works, please
contact us at: info@10dencegallery.com or use the contactform within the sidebar to transfer your request.
