Roosmarijn Pallandt

Roosmarijn Pallandt ventures to virgin lands where the connection between man and nature is at its most tangible. Places where the earth is sung to and experienced deeply. Pallandt attempts to unravel this connection by capturing these locations through image, sound, and textile: by means of photography, 16mm films, sound recordings, and weaves, which she makes in collaboration with local craftsmen.

‘Being able to travel with nomadic tribes and indigenous communities who inhabit mountains, deserts, glaciers and dense jungles has left a profound impression on me and my practice. The shepherds, farmers, weavers, hunters, shamans, and fishermen with whom I was fortunate to meet, showed me how nature and human beings are connected and equally important – that there is no hierarchy of values – both domains are one and inseparable.’

Author Stephen Ellcock writes: ‘Capturing the Ineffable in art and finding a meaningful visual vocabulary with which to evoke immanence, the numinous and the timeless are incredibly difficult balancing acts to pull off successfully without lapsing into fatuous bombast, empty evocations of the ‘sublime’, or limp gestures grasping at an insubstantial and deliberately vague notion of the ‘divine’. Roosmarijn Pallandt’s extraordinary work transcends all of these pitfalls and overfamiliar tropes and cliches creating magical images which inhabit the frontier between the real and the unreal , between all-that-has-been and all-that-will-be, weaving threads that tie together the visible and invisible worlds..’

‘Sound lies at the centre of my work. Every intervention in reality, each gesture, is paired with a sound like a vibration upon which we resonate’

– Roosmarijn Pallandt

Together with local weavers, Roosmarijn Pallandt creates textile pieces from fibres harvested from the bark and trunks of trees. Once a year, in the month of June, and depending on the position of the moon, a piece of bark is removed from the trunk. Strips are then cut from the soft inner bark and these are subsequently bathed at specific points in the flowing river. Afterwards, the fibres are crushed, cooked in sea water and finally spun into delicate, film-like filaments.

Spiritual song and dance are the foundations of the pieces which Pallandt creates with the weavers. The patterns of the wefts are determined by the vibrations, light, music and language of the location. Unfortunately, most of these indigenous languages are nearing extinction, being kept alive only by the community elders who still speak them. ‘To me, these fabrics are the mediators between the human body and its surroundings’, says Pallandt. ‘I believe that one is not only a translation of the other, but can also be found within the other – the tree behaves within the fabric as it does in the forest.’

The shadows of the jungle
Platinum print on Gampi paper

The soulful places discovered by Roosmarijn Pallandt during her strolls with the native inhabitants, become places to which she often returns alone, in the early morning or when dusk falls. ‘I take pictures there at sunrise or sunset, or in the night under a full moon, as the colours in the shadows are changed, my gaze slows and the way in which I perceive is revised.’

To translate these experiences and places, she employs some of the oldest known photographic techniques such as platinum- and carbon print. These process require focus and patience to breathe texture and depth into the monochrome palette. The two works shown below are offered as platinum prints on delicate Japanese Gampi paper.