Threadlike and light
Written by Paula Silbert.
Her Grandmother was an exceptional textile artist from Aalst, Belgium, a renowned centre for crochet, bobbin lace and knitting. Her father worked with metal.
And Tineke Van der Eecken absorbed her family’s respect and evolved her own advocacy and skill in those ancestral materials.
She’s soon to do a residency in Minderoo Foundation’s Exmouth Research Lab at the Ningaloo Reef along the Indian Ocean.
Tineke aims to communicate through jewellery, poetry, art and scientists’ research awe-filled and awful findings on climate change and the human impact on the environment.
Groundwork for The Indian Ocean Craft Triennial 2024.
Committed to supporting lung health fragility, it was her SymbioticA residency at the University of Western Australia where she cast tiny mouse lungs in gold to research human lung diseases. (Empathically, she is both a former CEO of the Lung Institute of WA and one-time smoker).
She’d observed examples of Corrosion Casting in overseas museums, but it was at UWA that she first used a resin capable of infiltrating the tiny, intricate structures of airways and blood vessels.
Tineke creates hidden landscapes within bodies making jewellery from inside out.
Installation artist-academic, Nien Schwarz shared with her a thread she’d observed in Tineke’s writing and making.
Tributaries, she posited.
Roots of plants. Rivulets and river deltas.
The pulse of life.
Bodies, and bodies of water.
Vascular systems.
Sketches in metal and wire.
‘The Kangaroo Paw Pendant’ talks of vulnerabilities within Australian marsupials.
We take them for granted, yet others are awed by their majesty and our biodiversity.
The exquisite ‘Baby Wallaby Sculpture’ is small enough to fit into your hand yet conveys the preciousness of this extraordinary marsupial.
And ‘Tread Lightly’, the pony hooves, looks threadlike and light. Yet, look at the impact of that species on the land.
This piece remains synthetic rather than precious in metal. Resin was injected into blood vessels for the casting then the cellular tissues were removed.
Tineke will be exhibiting at Rockingham Arts Centre in February 2023.
Photos by Yasmin Studio and Tine Van der Weghe.
