Let the INSECTS sing to the energy!

Larger than life, you can see antennae, thin legs, hairs, structures, and translucent wings. They seem to slip just over the edge of the paper, because no insect is visible in its entirety.

As part of her Reconstructing the Senses project, Mariëlle Videler, after completing 365 BIRDS and 365 PLANTS, depicted an insect every day. The metamorphosis of some insects represents the infinite circle of life. She believes that insects, plants, humans, and all other animals share a common spiritual life. During her daily ritual, she applied homemade gouache to the paper with her fingers. Every nine days, she reconstituted the paint using black pigment made from old vineyards, for which she visited the last Dutch pigment mill in Zaandam. The black refers to seeing with the inner eye, as described in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. On top of the dark, expressive layer, in which you can recognize her fingerprints here and there, Videler worked out the insect's details with various gray and white pencils. Throughout the entire process, she didn't look at the animal itself, but arrived at the image through her intuition and physically stored knowledge.

Reconstructing the Senses is a project initiated by Mariëlle Videler in 2019. It arose from a question after a conversation with artist and plant expert Abel Rodriquez in Bogotá, Colombia: what is in my canasto? According to Abel, this space next to your heart houses your knowledge. The project was developed over a five-year period: 365 BIRDS (2019-2020), 365 PLANTS (2020-2021), and 365 INSECTS (2022-2023).