Every day, from May 2022 to May 2023, Mariëlle Videler brought an INSECT to life. Just as with the BIRDS and the PLANTS, she worked not by looking at her subject, or even thinking about it, but by drawing with her fingers — letting the insect slowly emerge through the language of her own hand. The results are huge: creatures that seem, quite literally, to walk, fly or crawl off the paper. And isn't that fitting? We are so often just a moment too late to truly see an insect before it's gone.

About once a week she mixed a new batch of paint — a gouache built on black pigment — echoing, as in the other series, the idea of seeing with the inner eye from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. In search of the right black, she visited the last remaining pigment mill in the Netherlands, in Zaandam, where she found a pigment made from plant matter — old vine wood, burned down to black. Videler applied this gouache with her fingers, so that in its rawest form the movement of her hand, even her fingerprints, remain visible. Only once this layer had dried did she add the finer details — hairs, textures, antennae, eyes — drawn into the black with a very fine pencil, and with white oil and chalk pencils.

At the centre of the installation stands Videler's work Vulcanus: a textile column, embroidered, referring to the god of fire and his muse, love.

Part of the project Reconstructing the Senses; 365 BIRDS, 365 PLANTS, 365 INSECTS.

Link to article in magazine Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam > PDF