I've been following Marieke's blog for a while, and I'm happy to share her work with you here! She has a huge body of work and I could look at her blog archives for hours. What's different about Marieke's collages is that you can really see ideas coming together on her pages. Many of us use collage for generating ideas, but then only we understand them. I like that we can all see her brain at work.
Marieke Berghuis
www.traces.nl
Paris, France.
(I come from Amsterdam, Netherlands.)
Q: Describe your work in 10 words or less.
A: Graphic, letters, paper, different techniques.
Q: What do you like to work with (magazines, photographs, vintage)? Be specific!
A: Waste paper, such as candy wrappers, fashion magazines such as Vogue Italia, photos I made, photos I found at flea markets. It can be anything really.
Q: How long have you been creating collages and what made you start?
A: I guess since I was very little. I always used to work in my mother's studio. The first work I recall was a set of collage postcards for my high school's final exam in arts with the theme "goodbye".
Q: Are you solely an artist, or do you work in another profession?
A: I also do graphic design. I used to be an attorney but quit that 2 years ago.
Q: Do you have any formal art training?
A: I am currently in the middle of it. I started at the Academy for fine arts in The Hague and study now at Ecole Estienne in Paris.
Q: Explain your favourite techniques.
A: Using many techniques to prevent forgetting the impressions I get, and then cut and glue it together.
Q: Describe your favourite piece ever created.
A: It's not really one collage but a project I do together with my father. It's called Traces. We pick a week or longer to stroll Paris (or another city in the future maybe), looking for traces of people. He makes black and white pictures and I do collages. We just finished a second week and I am now working on the collages.
Q: What other artists do you admire?
A: I admire Matisse, Picasso, Paul Klee, Egon Schiele, Antoni Tapies, Christian Boltanski. Designers I admire are Bruno Munari, Dick Bruna and Jan Bons.
Thanks Marieke!
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Great interview, I also love how you can see her working process through the collages and how ideas come together, she is so generous in her sharing.