SASKIA NOOR VAN IMHOFF

Van Imhoff examines systems, hierarchical structures, and ideas about collecting in her work. In recent years, she has expanded her focus beyond the institutional framework towards an outdoor space, acquiring a plot of rural farmland on the northern coast of the Netherlands. This plot of land has become, as she defines it, an ‘organic collection’ that she has been exploring in her work since moving, as she restores, responds to, and works with the historic land she lives on today. The ongoing body of work developing from this project has inspired two museum exhibitions at The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL, 2022) and Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL, 2023), and will form the basis of her solo exhibition at GRIMM London.

Transplanting her studio practice to this former dairy farm in the Dutch countryside, Van Imhoff’s research has been drawn to the idea of the land as a repository of knowledge, an expression of its own history, and a resource to learn more about ourselves. The process of documenting and rehabilitating the site forms the basis of her work, creating installations that echo the space outside of their original environment - the resulting photographs and sculptural installations examining systems of perception, archiving and archaeology. Van Imhoff often takes apart familiar objects and recontextualizes them, continuously building on her own previous works. While addressing ideas of stewardship and our responsibility to and reliance on the land, she also questions the idea of a collection as a knowledge system and a mechanism that selects, differentiates, and classifies.

Bringing an awareness to the knowledge held within materials themselves, Van Imhoff works with found objects on the former farmstead, including wooden beams or the sprawling roots of trees growing around the building. She employs a process of ‘grafting’ - a botanical technique to propagate and renew a cutting from a plant - as she casts part of an object in bronze and aluminium and creates a hybrid sculptural work that both preserves and monumentalises the material and its history. Van Imhoff’s process of grafting together objects becomes a metaphor for the progress of the land itself; by rethinking, recontextualising and reclaiming a site, new relationships are born, and new concepts of nature develop. Each artwork creates an opportunity to rethink the land and its use, value, and legacy.