Hanne Van Dyck is a Brussels-based artist whose practice moves at the intersection of myth, ecology, and ritual. Working across textile, text, and installation, she engages with expanded forms of storytelling that channel embodied knowledge and more-than-human intelligence. Drawing from land-based cosmologies, ritual technologies, and feminist theory, her work unfolds as mythopoetic inquiry — giving form to the invisible and transformative.
Van Dyck’s practice inhabits liminal spaces where personal and collective transformation become sensible. Her long-term engagement with mountainous terrains in China, Switzerland, and Morocco reflects a desire to understand how landscape imprints the body through longing, listening, and poetic observation. Her explorations into trance-based healing practices manifest through intimate textile works, spell-texts, and ceremonial installations that function as temporary spaces for grief, metamorphosis, and invocation. Her work is grounded in slowness and embodied process, integrating techniques such as trance meditation, needlework, and reading aloud as gestures of attention and reconnection.
Van Dyck collaborates with dancers, anthropologists, and ritual practitioners. She is a core member of the Aunties Collective, cultivating alternative kinship structures beyond normative family models, and co-founder of Common Reflection, a platform for intimate artistic exchange.
Through commissioned ritual objects, collaborations, and site-responsive installations, she creates shared acts of transformation and remembrance. Whether in institutional spaces or private ritual settings, her work opens resonance for those seeking to re-enchant their relation to land, lineage, and self. Her recent writing, including Autobiography of a Volcanic Force, articulates 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