Biography

          Marloes Staal (Apeldoorn, 1991) is a visual artist from The Netherlands. She graduated in 2014 with a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) at the AKI-Artez University of the Arts in Enschede, and finished a one year post-graduate course in 2017 at the Bcademie in Rotterdam. From 2013 until 2018 she has been a founding member and curator at The Robson ateliers, and has worked as an art-education teacher in museums since 2015. Her mainly sculptural work explores our mental and physical relationship with the environment, rooted in ecology, anthropology and craftsmanship.

          Her works have been shown internationally in shows and art fairs, and is part of both public and private collections including the Rabobank collection, Overijssel collection and V&B collection. She has worked with commissions for the government and in collaborations, making works for public space as well as private assignments. Due to her research, she has been on residencies in Scotland, Berlin and Leipzig, for which she received a governmental stipend in 2019. She has been working between Leipzig and Enschede since, building up exhibitions as a technical assistant in the MdBK Museum in Leipzig, and helps to coordinate the international Art Collective Mods as a core member.

Artist Statement

         My work consist of sculptures, photography and text, evolving around our mental and physical relationship with the environment, questioning the anthropological perspective with a wide variety of materials that explore the significance and effect of this relationship. By creating works that evolve around the perceived boundaries between the human and non-human, I want to rethink the human and ecology relationship, and create a new narrative that redefines our anthropological viewpoint by illustrating our interwoven dependence and interconnectedness with our environment.

         My sculptural work is figurative but abstracted, playing with commonly held associations and tactile experiences of our bodies, exploring the feelings a material generates. The decision to use a material is based on extensive research into the origin, the development and the meaning of a material, dissecting what the direct and larger effect of this material on our world is.
By using a wide variety of materials, I’m constantly trying to learn from old craftsmanship as well as new techniques, a time-consuming process in which sometimes new techniques are developed in response to the material's individual identity.