Let the INSECTS sing to the energy!

Larger than life size you can recognize antennas, thin legs, hairs, structures and transparent wings. They seem to slip over the edge of the paper, because no insect can be seen in its entirety.

As part of her project Reconstructing the Senses, Mariëlle Videler, after 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 made new paint based on 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 details of the insect with different types of gray and white pencils. During the entire process she did not look at the animal, but arrived at the image from 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, your knowledge is housed in this space next to your heart. The project was spun out over a period of five years; 365 BIRDS (2019-2020), 365 PLANTS (2020-2021), 365INSECTS (2022-2023).