PROTO: Jack Brandsma & Hester Oerlemans & students - (RE)DO

Every year in June, Zwolle bustles with life thanks to the PROTO festival. Students from creative MBO and HBO courses show their graduation work in the Spoorzone and at various locations in the centre of Zwolle. Together with Museum de Fundatie, PROTO also invites two artists-in-residence every year, who work with the students on an exhibition at one of the museum locations. Mutual inspiration and mixing different styles, working methods and materials are the starting points. This year, designer Jack Brandsma and visual artist Hester Oerlemans are PROTO's guests. Together with students, they will take over the Garden Hall of Kasteel het Nijenhuis.

Brandsma and Oerlemans' working methods contain a striking similarity: both makers often use existing (visual) elements to create new sculptures. With minimal interventions, they manage to transform an existing thing into a totally new image, often with alienating elements. This way, they both make you look at familiar things around you in a different way. With this in mind, in this project Brandsma and Oerlemans work with students to find existing objects that can serve as a starting point for making something new. The students then set to work in multidisciplinary project teams, with as many representatives from different studies in each team as possible. Together, they will investigate how to give an object a completely new meaning with a small change. The results will soon be on show in the Garden Hall of Kasteel het Nijenhuis. This space, the former orangery of the castle, also plays an important role in the cooperation between the artists-in-residence and the students from the very beginning. After all, you can see a space as an existing image; what interventions are needed to change its meaning? How do you make a space, with minimal interventions, your own? The students will also tackle these questions under the guidance of Brandsma and Oerlemans.

Dutch interior architect and product designer Jack Brandsma (1969) studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where he obtained a master's degree in Design Products in 2001. He already obtained a bachelor's degree in Interior Architecture from the Minerva Academy in Groningen in 1997. As a designer, Brandsma has taken a fresh look at continuing to work with plastics. He then increasingly explores in his work the possibilities of working with other, more natural materials, such as bio-plastics, but also hemp fibres or potato starch.

_{Panton Imprint Chair, Jack Brandsma 2023, photo: Jelle de Groot}

Mixing different worlds, playful interventions and commentaries on everyday reality are the common thread in the oeuvre of Dutch artist Hester Oerlemans (1961), who lives in Berlin. Her work, in which no medium is left unused, always shows a poetic then critical observation of her surroundings. In her paintings, drawings, and installations, Oerlemans seems to unravel the object of her fascination to its core. Whether it concerns the art world, urban space or the personal sphere, time and again Oerlemans ruthlessly, and not without humour, puts her finger on the sore spot.

Header photo: SEAT, Hester Oerlemans 2017

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