MELLA JAARSMA

Working primarily through wearable garments, she has long sought to close the distance between the artwork and the viewer. This exhibition presents a new body of work that invites viewers to consider, through bodily sensation, the consumer desire and environmental responsibility surrounding clothing, and the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature.

In Jaarsma’s wearable works, garments are not simply objects worn on the body – they are devices that place the viewer in immediate confrontation with the work. Rather than merely observing from a distance, viewers encounter the work through its human-scaled dimensions, its sensory qualities, and the very possibility of wearing it. In this encounter, bodily presence is not incidental to understanding the work; it becomes the central site where meaning arises and is felt.

Beyond the Pleasure of Consumption: Sustainability as an Exchange of Breath

The new series My Breath Returns to the Tree begins with the immediate pleasure that arises the moment we purchase new clothing. New garments evoke confidence, desire, and a sense of self- transformation, sometimes offering the comfort known as “retail therapy.” Yet behind this experience lies a complex web of resource extraction, manufacturing, labor, transport, and environmental cost. Jaarsma asks whether consumption might become not a one-way extraction but, like the relationship between humans and trees, an act of mutual exchange. Humans exhale carbon dioxide; trees convert it into oxygen through photosynthesis, sustaining the cycle of life. This invisible yet intimate and unceasing exchange of breath forms the central conceptual axis running through the series.

This exhibition does not present sustainability in the language of deprivation or sacrifice. Instead, it reconsiders sustainability as a sense of relationship and reciprocity exchanged in every moment. We do not “repay” the tree once; we are already in relationship through the breath we exchange each day. Through this perspective, the artist seeks a new balance between humans and nature, production and consumption, sensation and responsibility.

The garments in the exhibition reveal tensions between the natural and the industrial, the organic and the synthetic, the regenerative and the extractive, the handmade and the machine-made. The fault lines between the biodegradable and the permanent, the raw material and the processed, become an important formal and conceptual field in this body of work, prompting viewers to reconsider, through bodily sensation, where what we wear comes from, what it leaves behind, and where it goes next.

My Breath Returns to the Tree brings the structures of consumer desire and responsibility surrounding clothing into the register of bodily sensation rather than abstract discourse. Jaarsma proposes sustainable living not as an abstract imperative but as a matter of intimate, daily relationship, as close as breathing, inviting viewers to reconsider what they wear, what they leave behind, and their relationship with nature.