The autumn in the Netherlands was for me always a season with storms and rain. I like storms, I like autumn. I like the feeling of changing and cleaning up. In Sweden I still like the autumn. The storms made place for beautiful leaves. The forest in this time of the year is just fantastic and several of my works are inspired by autumn leaves. When I walked home from my work my eyes saw these nice broken leaves. I had to take  them with me and put them in the scanner. The moment that leaves are starting to fall apart is what is trickering me.

In the work A time for, which I showed already earlier these week, the shapes of the leaves are inspired on these broken leaves. I emphasize even the holes in the leaves with a crocheted line.

My head is spinning on a new idea (next to the lav ideas) with this broken leaves. Maybe I continue with the leaves made from birch bark, maybe I try again in paper. The two next photos showed that I tried earlier to make leaves in paper, but sometimes you can feel you are not 100% ready with a work. The first photo shows brown paper leaves where I sewed on. I focused more on the shape of dry leaves. The second photo shows the same kind of leaves but then placed on thin sticks. The idea here was more to look at the movement of the autumn leaves. This work won in Germany 3 weeks ago the first prize. Very fun to win a prize! And a big honor!

Where all my new ideas will end I don’t know yet. But if you want to know please follow me on my website. When I made new work I will put photos on that site (although sometimes it can take a while)

the adress is : hannahstreefkerk.viewbook.com

This post is my last post on this blog and I have to say, writing is difficult. I knew that already before that I am not a writer, and in another language I feel even more handicapped.

Thank you all for reading and enjoy the rest of the day!

Every friday in this month we (Greger and me) have workshops with school children in Eksjö. The museum where we have the exhibition (see my first blog post this week) organized this. We decided to learn the children something about mandalas with nature materials. First we show them our exhibition and talk about the relation with nature and after that the make mandalas in groups. We collected all kind of materials from the forest and stones etc. The results are very nice and it is amazing to see how the children work. Today we had first a group of 14 year old children, after that a group of 8-9 years old. A big difference in approach of the different groups. The younger children really play with the materials and are not afraid to try. The 14 years old worked as well very well but were way may careful and did not really dare. Some photos of the working process and of the results.

Today I am tired and my blogpost will not be so long. I worked today as a slöjd teacher in a grundskola. And it is not that I don’t like my job, because I really like it and I work on the best school, but… Many artist probably will recognize what I am going to write now. When you feel an artist inside you would like to work all the time with that. I always get mixed in my head. One side of me wants only to work with art, but because I can not live from my artworks, I have to have a job next to it. When I work somewhere else I can not spend as much time on my own work as I would like. And because of that maybe the quality of my works get lower, and maybe therefore I can not live of my work..and so on , and so on. Maybe this is the chicken-egg story.

At the other hand, when I imagen only to work for my art and not have a side job, then I will miss a lot of contacts and social live. I like to hear my students point of view and sometimes new ideas get born during my work in school, because of responses of students. At the moment I work 3 days in the week in school. That’s good for me. I just earn enough to pay my living costs and I have time to work on my own work. But even when it seems to be in balance, sometimes my head thinks different. Like now, I would like to test more work with the lav, but friday evening will be the first free moment…and then we have the next dilemma: family..how much time do I want to spend with them. It is also very nice to have some nice time together with my sambo and the children.

I don’t want to complain at all. I think I have the two best jobs ever and I have the nicest family, but just sometimes it crashes a bit in my brain. What are my priorities…?

The last half year was quite a hectic one with a lot of exhibitions and art projects. Nothing wrong with that, but there was hardly time to think about new work. At the moment I can breath a bit more and I can feel new ideas plopping up in my head to try out. Half oktober I will go to Australian for a big sculpture exhibition (sculpture by the sea, Bondi, Sydney). I will create there on place a site specific work. The idea is ready so I don’t need to spend my time at the moment at that.

I always enjoy the moments in my work that I can try new ideas and get new ideas. It is exciting to discover and try. When I work to long with old work ore ideas I get a kind of bored. The last years I worked a lot with old leaves and broken trees. At the moment I am fascinated by Lav. I like to look on wikipedia and the swedish wiki writes about Lav:

lavar har det vetenskapliga namnet Lichenes och är organismer bildade av ett symbiotiskt förhållande mellan en svamp och en alg, eller ibland en cyanobakterie. Svampens roll är att utgöra stödjevävnad och skydd samt att suga upp vatten, medan algen genom fotosyntes bidrar med energi.

The symbioses is for me the interesting part, beside the beautiful looks of lav. Lav can only exist with the symbioses. When one part of the cooperation is not working, there will be no lav. All the factors, like clean air, the right bottom, the svamp and the alg need to be there. As humans we could learn of lav in working together!

I took a lot of photos of lav and at the moment I try to make my own lav with crocheting. What it will be ore bring me I don’t know yet, we will see. At the moment I mostly enjoy playing with yarn and get a free head again.

In my first blog post I would like to start political. Waking up this morning, then reading in the news that I live in a country where 13 % of the voting people vote for a racistic party makes me sick!!! There are a few things which I will never understand in my life, and one of them is this. I am not allowed to vote for the government in Sweden because I still have the Dutch nationality, so there for I use this blog to express my vote and my worries for the Swedish country. Sweden is a rich, peaceful and beautiful country and what is better then sharing this with everybody! So please all Swedish people, help to keep it like that and fight against this negative, racistic, hate spreading party and people. In the end it will destroy the society. And if readers of this blog vote for this party, please try to explain me why?

Back to my basic…art. Last week opened in Eksjö museum the exhibition One place after another. This exhibition which I have together with my lovely sambo Greger Ståhlgren shows works related to the theme how we look and experience nature. In my work I am fascinated by how we act, feel and see when we are in a natural environment. In the Netherlands the ’nature’ is designed. All the green areas are planned, no wilderness is left, even when it sometimes feels like that. In the Netherlands you could say, are humans the one who control everything, not nature. But when you look closer maybe nature wins after all. The sea takes it place again, and when humans will not do anything plants grow everywhere…

In Sweden the nature feels less designed, and it seems to me that Swedish people are closer to nature. It started for me simple: when it is raining cats and dogs outside, school children have to play outside anyway. They just dress up for that! Before I moved to Sweden the forest was something almost scary for me. I could not see the sky anymore, the sky which you always see in the Dutch open landscapes. I slowly started my discovery journey in the forest, and I begin to like it more and more. When I have discussions with Greger about our works then I can see the difference in how we look at the forest. Greger sees the bigger picture, I focus more on the details because the bigger picture is to big for me at the moment, to chaotic!

I will show some pictures of my work in the exhibition and I would like to invite you all to come to Eksjö and have a look. The exhibition is there until 12 oktober!

This is the Swedish text about the exhibition:

ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER

”One place after another” handlar om förhållandet till naturen och hur vi ser och inte ser den.

Hannah Streefkerk och Greger Ståhlgren undersöker platser och material i ett historiskt sammanhang och försöker förmedla vad tiden och naturens kretslopp innebär för skogen och landskapet.

Harry Martinsson beskriver i en dikt hur vinden fortplantar sig och leker i ett träd. Det lekfulla och överraskande i naturen är något vi sällan observerar själva, eftersom naturen – som oftast verkar obeveklig och autonom – inte förställer sig för att vi är på besök utan alltid är just bara natur.

Hannah Streefkerk undersöker det textila uttrycket i relation till naturen, ofta med hjälp av stygn. Omhändertagande är ett ledord i sammanhanget. Hon arbetar också med landart och installationer, där känslan av att naturen är viktig lyfts fram. Hennes textila arbeten visar på hur naturen behöver synliggöras och ibland repareras. Detaljer i naturen accentueras.

Arbetsprocessen är central. Det får ta tid att hitta detaljer. Det är viktigt att visa upp det ofta typiskt kvinnliga textila arbetet som något tidskrävande.

Greger Ståhlgren arbetar med foton och installationer. Fotografierna beskriver skogens variationer, detaljer och sammanhang. Bilderna är dubbelexponerade och tagna direkt i naturen. Ljuset är väsentligt. Mångfalden och direktheten inför landskapet är viktigt att försöka gestalta, lugnet och rörelsen likaså.

Antika formelement dyker ibland upp som en del av en installation. Relationen mellan trädens former och typiska arkitektoniska formelement bidrar till att bildernas innehåll kommunicerar och beskriver ett tidsperspektiv.

the overview picture

the local newspaper

the work Mended Leaves, all the leaves are mended with stitches, some close ups:

the work Circulation, the leaves are dancing!

The installation A time fore. Made a pieces birch Bark, sewed together.

The installation Twisted. This work is inspired on the plants in South Korea, where I worked one month this summer. It seemed to me that a lot of plants are growing so fast there, they take over the country.