2018 – present The Pheasant Orchard This website has been organised as a portfolio and it charts the development in the oeuvre of Carlijn Mens from 2005 till 2018. This last page marks a provisional end, but with its images it also indicates a new beginning, initiated by the location where Mens now lives…
2017 Residency Van Gogh House (Zundert) Spring 2017 I stayed at the house in Zundert where the Van Gogh family lived and Vincent was born. In many respects it was an emotional time of my life. More than once I read the impressive letters Vincent wrote to his parents and his brother Theo; the grave…
2016 – present, Road Side In 2016 I rode my bike to bring my son to school every day, back and forth between Schoorl and Bergen. In spring I saw the roadside awakening, plants and flowers on that poor soil of sand, stones, tarmac, salt after a cold winter. I put sheets of paper amidst…
2015 Mensch / Mens Mensch is about human beings being expelled. A procession of bodies. A crowd of people on the move. The Mensch project is a continuation of the installation Faith-Fear-Face presented in 2013 at the GEM in The Hague, in which I tried to visualize one of the great dramas of human trafficking: in…
2013 Mouvement dans l’incertitude / Moving Within Incertainty (Maison Sigean) A project for the Maison Sigean, near Toulouse. The Spanish border is not far away. Reading about the history of the place: during the Civil War in Spain many people fled along that route through the passes in the Pyrenees. As often happens an image appeared…
2013-2015 Spuren der Bedeutung / Traces de Sens / Traces Of Meaning This project is based on a work also shown in the exhibition in L’humain laisse une trace de sens / Man Leaves A Traces Of Meaning. I asked my children to walk back and forth, on two separate sheets of paper, telling them to…
2012 Faith Fear Face In the police files these three words appear often. It’s about loss of faith, fear, losing face; if people have gone to another country and are exploited, have to survive through crime or prostitution, they cannot ever go back. Losing your face. The structural elements in this installation are shadow projections…
2012 Body Scan (studies for Faith Fear Face) Because of Container (2005) I was asked to do a project about people who try to flee towards a better future by hiding in containers transported by lorries and ships. Sometimes this ends in disaster, like the 58 Chinese who died in 2000 trying to reach the…
2011-2015 Preserving The Artists (Woody van Amen) My projects often start with an image that becomes more and more clear in my mind. My intention was to pay homage to artists who were my teachers although they were not aware of this. I grew up in a house filled with art. The artists who…
2011 Preserved Places (Eschenau) In the Steigerwald forest – which I consider to be herman de vries’ biotope – I made a big work on a sheet of paper 10 meter long. The idea was to include herman’s shadow within the drawing of the forest, but something did not feel right, so in the end…
