Instagram Artist in Residence 2018 Announced!

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 – 15:45We are pleased to announce Clementine Edwards as our Instagram artist in residence for September 2018. Ponies, Sand, Ponies! Known as the international centre for judicial process and its associated organisations, The Hague is also home to a population of semi-feral ‘ponies’. The Konik horses live and graze in the sand dunes of Meijendel, part of a 2000-hectare nature reserve within walking distance of the city centre. The reserve is controlled by a public Dutch water company that uses the dunes to filter, purify and store water that it then sells to the public. Hence, conservation goes hand in hand with capitalist gain. But when the dunes were choked by invasive flora in the nineties, jeopardising industry, Dunea introduced Koniks to graze the grasses and re-establish it as a bio-diverse site for insects, birds and lizards. The dunes returned to health and these feral little horses became a staple of the local ecosystem. Although they make up less than 0.5% of the Netherlands’ land surface, The Hague’s sand dunes account for around 50% of the Netherlands’ biodiversity.  Over the coming weeks, artist Clementine Edwards will be researching the Koniks, taking feminist anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of contamination as collaboration as a starting point. Throughout the takeover, Edwards will intersperse on-site and archival images with half-feral artworks made of material sourced from the Meijendel dunes to visually articulate the unfolding research. Follow the project via Arts Catalyst’s Instagram account!#poniessandponies ABOUT THE ARTIST Clementine Edwards was born in Melbourne, lives in Rotterdam, and recently graduated from the Dutch Art Institute. She is currently developing the idea of ‘material as kin’, which emerges from her research into the material traces of social experience. This thinking expands on her work around complicating the post-traumatic state, which was the basis for her MFA thesis. With its roots in gold and silversmithing, Clementine’s practice speaks of the messy, bodily intersection between craft, language and trauma. It materialises, memorialises and extends interpersonal interactions – the personal counters the violence of abstraction – and in so doing asks to be seen as a window onto the some of the structural realities of social organisation. clementineedwards.com Image: courtesy the artist