I explore a general question: what is this web we call Nature and how do we position ourselves in it?
Everything is connected through a web called the biosphere. I am fascinated with the concept of the noösphere, defined by Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Jardin a hundred years ago as the mental sphere of life; the capacity of human thought to change the biosphere. Now, we call this outcome the anthropocene: the epoch of human impact on ecosystems, including climate change. what does it mean to be an artist in the age of the anthropocene? How do we become ecologically intelligent? The anthropocene challenges human exceptionalism. We must come to a fundamental understanding we are a porous organism, a human wholobiont, with microbial and viral kin and symbiotic relationships in a living world.
Eveline Kolijn is a printmaker and installation artist living and working in Calgary. Growing up in the Caribbean, she has experienced both the beauty and demise of coral reefs. Eveline received a MA in cultural anthropology from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1986 and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art+ Design in 2008 including the Governor General’s Award for academic achievement.
The Portfolio showcases the interplay between printmaking and biology, ecology and related disciplines, presenting my visual response as an artist to the research of the scientist.
I joined the Coral Ark project, to create digital, laser-cut prints that can be folded into the geodesic shapes of coral phages and virus capsids to visualize the cross-disciplinary research between virology and coral reefs.
My art has been used on the cover of scientific publications, and I have also been invited to create specific art for covers. This always triggers a short period of informing myself on the content of the publication and leads me to learn more about all this wonderful biology. I recently completed my latest cover for a PhD thesis on using immunogenetics and protein markers for the early detection of lymphoma.
Over the years I have built art relationships in Athens and I am very excited to be part of the exhibition “Ocean Breath” in the fascinating and elegant Herakleidon Museum of Ancient Greek Technology in the historic district of Thissio, next to the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora and the Temple of Hephaestus.
I have been honoured to be included in the international blog Artists and Climate Change, with an excellent piece written by Susan Hoffman Fishman.
She discussed my Ocean Inside project and recently finished Tidalectics Portfolio.
“Eveline Kolijn was highly influenced by the contemporary art collection at the Vorres. In her work, Metabolic Rift, she shows her deep interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and Karl Marx’s theory of ecology. Just like the rift itself emulates the environmental and ecological crisis, so does Metabolic Rift show the cracks and disconnections that capitalism creates between social and natural systems.”
In February 2013, I was an invited speaker for an EMBO – PVC Conference in Heidelberg, Germany.
A year before the conference, I received an email from Dr. C. Jogler, who wanted to now why I had chosen this Planctomyces bacterium for my print and where I found the texture that I applied on the bacterium because they had only observed it in detail very recently.
