Photographer and artist Mathilde Jansen graduated from the Royal Academy, The Hague (KABK) in 2006, following which she undertook several residencies and exhibited her photography internationally, as well as carrying out commissions for the media as well as for companies and organizations. Her primarily photographic practice seeks the universal value of natural resources and minerals as a means of tracing the complex relationship between people and the global economy. She aims to create new perspectives from which to examine social structures and the connections between the local and global, which, for Jansen, form the basis of human attitudes, social positioning and intercultural communication. In her practice Jansen consciously interweaves market-driven ways of thinking with an integrated holistic vision of nature, teasing out the borders between the two. Using experiments in analogue photography, incorporating awe-inspiring constructions on location and manipulating medium format negatives, she creates a dynamic interplay between subject matter and representation, navigating areas as diverse and all encompassing as nature and ecology, spirit and community.

Mathilde Jansen takes us into a reality of collective wilderness and symbiosis that we see reflected in nature. By means of unique experiments in which analogue photo negatives are manipulated with inks she explores a personal interaction with invisible networks and living landscapes. In this process, old layers are lost or merged. The layered nature in her work reflects a deeper dimension that we as humans belong to. Jansen’s play with the perception of multidimensionality, shadow, light, solid and translucent forms, moves logical thinking towards a new dynamic.