Hanne Van Dyck is a Brussels-based artist working with text, textile, performance, and installation. Drawing on a wide constellation of narrative systems, from ancient mythologies and esoteric texts to oracular traditions and ritual experience, she engages with liminality as both theme and method. Her practice explores states of transformation—symbolic, emotional, and embodied—through a mythopoetic lens. At the core of her work lies an interest for how humans relate to more-than-human worlds, including land, spirit, and elemental force. These investigations often take metaphorical shape through volcanic craters, mountain bodies, or descent motifs, mapping a porous and intimate relation between inner landscapes and geological ones.
Her installations, often combining quilted or embroidered textile, voice, text, and ceremonial structure, create spaces that resist closure. They hold space for what cannot be easily seen, said, or resolved—allowing discomfort, ambiguity, and transformation to co-exist within shared forms. Working on the human relationship with mountains, she has completed residencies in China, Switzerland and Morocco. She delved into the practice of trance healing ceremonies in Brazil, Belgium, China, and Morocco, where she lived and worked for several years.
Van Dyck’s practice is grounded in slowness and embodied process, integrating techniques such as meditative writing, needlework, and reading aloud as gestures of attention and reconnection. She collaborates closely with dancers, anthropologists, artists, and those who engage spiritual or somatic knowledge. She is co-founder of Common Reflection, a platform for intimate artistic exchange, and a member of the Aunties Collective, which cultivates alternative kinship structures and interdependent imaginaries beyond the normative family model.
Her recent writing, such as Autobiography of a Volcanic Force, reflects an ongoing engagement with embodied states and feminist myth-making—articulating a cosmology in which pain, pleasure, and planetary becoming converge as raw, eruptive force.
Van Dyck maximizes a poetic resourcefulness in her work, manifested in a partial loss of the documentary, to its recovery in the key of fiction. That is to say, her diaristic registrations and observations might be held to be documentary in nature—as if she were to shed light on forensic evidence for us—but are representational insofar as Van Dyck subtly adds additional mental building blocks in order to cope, grapple, face and translate these encounters. Her artistic registry and agency, in this sense, becomes a meticulous balance act of applying oneself to an environment and to make deductions from that application. Not to say reductions, or deconstructions, as to strip the things she encounters from their performance, but rather a type of constructivism that looks at how many performers are assembled in a subject—a mountain, for instance—and how many performers benefit from, and are needed to sustain its existence.
Then, what is to be taken from Van Dyck’s application to the environment, by putting her encounters on the translation table, to the subsequent transposition of her findings into both an artistic context and the space and time of an artwork? I only suppose that the mental building blocks she adds come to represent attempts and approaches to rendering oneself—and also us, visitors, to some extent—sensitive and conscious to an environment, to one’s place in a scheme and an ecology of things and interrelations, and how that placement, that venturing outward of oneself both shapes the relations with other, external things and entities, but also, more importantly, how these things come to shape us.
The works of Hanne Van Dyck may remind us of such contested and dubious positioning ground for the human figure, of being wholly embedded within an environment whilst remaining to consider oneself as an external force. Through her work, she introduces a number of templates from which her fieldwork is translated into a new patchwork of significations and meanings, as to underscore this push and pull, forward and backward between observer and active participant, of human phenomenality and language within contexts devoid and indifferent to such readings. By invoking the ghosts of previous states, she tells us stories of the memories and histories we may attach to these subjects and our encounters with them, practiced through the idea of—paraphrasing Donna Haraway—in order to become one, you have to be many in the first place, also as to be enabled to talk about the tissues of being anything in the first place, a mountain, a plant, a drop of water, a cloud-being, a pine tree, a flock of sparrows. We are legion!
- Niekolaas Lekkerkerk, The Office For Curating