Tanja Smeets

Inside the Blooming Surface & The Life in Between

Artist Tanja Smeets’ installations seem to grow from walls and ceilings. The organic shapes infiltrate a space and attach themselves to the architectural structure. Smeets often incorporates everyday objects into her work such as spoons, cups and frying sieves, as well as self-made ceramic and textile shapes. She uses these as building blocks, adding textiles on location to create a coherent whole.

For the exhibition ‘Is it alive?’ in the TextielMuseum, she created an alien landscape titled Inside the blooming surface. In it, subtly moving, rustling creatures regarded visitors as they passed by. Only at second glance did it become apparent that dozens of leaf catchers and tie wraps had been assimilated into a slowly shifting world of laser-cut felt and irregular knitted growths. At Manifesta 15, a variation of this landscape was shown in Vapor Buxeda Vell, an old textile factory in Sabadell, Spain. During this biennial event, The life in between, a second installation that Smeets created in the lab last year, was also on display in La Seu d’Ègara museum in Terrassa.

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