ARTIST STATEMENT

“What I make is about vulnerability and strength, about the path to freedom. And for me, freedom is the start of creativity.” 

Artist Micky Hoogendijk reveals her vulnerability and her strength in her work. She manages to inextricably link these two extremes, as she reveals the choices life repeatedly presents her with: whether to stand still or press ahead. She chooses to celebrate life and finds answers in her boundless imagination. Hoogendijk started capturing things in order to let them go. She transforms joy and pain into images – photographs and, since 2020, sculptures – that are both contemporary and timeless. Her subjects are about people in all their diversity. The symbolism in Hoogendijk’s photographs is both classical and contemporary, universal and personal. The same is true of her sculpture series, The Ones.

Hoogendijk shows herself in her photography and sculpture, and in doing so depicts the other. She hopes her work will connect you to her emotions, and bring you closer to your own. Ultimately, it is not about what you see, but what you do not see, she believes: about what you feel, in other words. Hoogendijk is enchanted by the invisible connection between artwork, artist and viewer. “That’s where everything comes together. It feels like magic. At that point, my work is no longer mine.” It is in this fusing of energies, in the effect of one thing upon another that Hoogendijk believes her place as an artist lies.