ABOUT ROELIEN

Roelien first encountered ‘art’ at the age of 13 when the creating she had done since kindergarten became a subject, a choice. Something included in her school curriculum in South Africa.

It was only at University that she started exploring ‘what’ art is. The labelling of herself as an artist had already started at school. There was simply no other career she was interested in.
Recently she has descovered the motivation for her artistic career, her desire to create and express herself.

As an emotionally charged being, she has a need to express. She feels emotion so deeply that creating, and working on art is the only way of dealing with such emotion. While her work is personal, it covers many broad topics. Often dealing with the topic, and practice of Art itself.
What Art is, and what it could be.

Roelien treats art as an ever evolving language, that she is still learning. She pushes the boundries given to her in an effort to explore a better means of expressing herself. This sense of progression in art, as well as her personal life gives her work life, and purpose while setting her free in the process.

Art directs her life, in the same way her life directs her art.

It is a constant struggle, to keep this balance as pure and honest as possible and one has to be aware of things like the capitalist driven world we live in.

“I never want these things to influence my art negatively.”

By being aware of- and controlling these influences, she creates.

This is the balance between ‘life’ and ‘art’ that is controlled in her practice. One could not exist without the other.

“My art needs to fit into my life, and my life is what inspires me to create art.
In this way art becomes a lot more ‘free’ to me, and life therefore too.
I can create anywhere life takes me. I don’t need to be confined to a studio.
I need to live life to create art, and I need art in turn to live life to the fullest.
My life is my art and my art is my life.”

Edited by Lauren Louise Hammond

SHARE ON
Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Pin It

  • Finally, it is appropriate to reflect on Brink’s experience of creating visual art and then feeling
    regeneration though primal sacrifice by fire and interconnectedness with other people. Her
    experience of regaining faith in a capacity to love and be loved again, however fleetingly,
    is part of what Bert Olivier (2002: 242, citing also Olivier 1987) calls the “power of art …
    [wherein Love the way you lie specifically, and AfrikaBurn in general, has an enabling energy]
    to transform the everyday, as well as people

    John Steele

  • My husband thinks you’re a genius by the way

    Bronwyn Millar

  • Genius

    Laurence Bloch

  • Changing one’s name to William Kenridge (as Roelien Brink did in 2008) is massively pathetic

    Gavin Younge

  • The exhibition challenges our value system, which the artist considers groundless

    Anonymous

  • Art gag

    Mary Corrigal

  • Identity scam

    Sean O Toole

  • ’But you see for me, something like this Hirst thing…uhm artwork, is that it…that it…And this is one of the problems with art. The problem is that it is outside of lived reality/experience. You go into a space and you like: ‘Okay now I am experiencing art…’ So you shift your head, and you look at things in what is essentially an artificial way. For me the power of your work is that you are blurring those lines. There is a subtlety to your work, where these elements are combined … (Referring to the medium used)…it is something I respect in nature and God (if there is such a thing). It is the sheer surreality of lived reality like this.

    Peter van Straaten

  • To have someone like you, that is actually interrogating that space, that is part of that zone that is interrogated at the same time, and poking fun, teasing is fantastically beautiful. It is like you’re someone on the inside (of art).’ For me the power of your work is not even so much in that paradox. It is that you create a reality – the same with CCV – People storm out. This is far more exciting.

    Peter van Straaten

  • Almost miming the craft of thinking. This is the sort of stuff needs to be shown on the Venice Biennale!

    John Bauer