About the work​

These collages are built from the world as it actually exists. The animals are real. The plants are real. The colours are unaltered. What changes is the logic that holds them together.

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Goldfish orbit the sun. Blue sea slugs drift through a cloudy sky. A frogfish made of wildflowers stands in a wildflower meadow and is nearly invisible. Hummingbirds circle the moon. A camouflage master sits on a plain yellow background and stares directly back at you..

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The collages move between two distinct modes. In the layered, immersive works (dense, teeming, full of surprise) many species and ecosystems coexist in a single impossible space. Above and below, land and ocean, the microscopic and the cosmic are all present at once. In the geometric series, a single species is pressed into pure mathematical form: spiral, triangle, square, honeycomb grid, mandala. The geometry is imposed from outside. The life inside it remains entirely its own.

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Both strands share the same premise: that the natural world, looked at with enough attention (and a willingness to rearrange its conventions) is already stranger, more generous, and more beautiful than we ordinarily allow ourselves to notice.

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About the artist 

For more than twenty years, Hester Brink worked at the intersection of law, psychology, and violence. As an investigator and profiler for the Dutch police, she studied serious and organised crime: homicide cases, serial offenders, the patterns that distinguish one kind of harm from another. She studied criminology and criminal law, held selling exhibitions, and painted commissioned murals. Then she raised three sons and built a career. Art waited.

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In December 2020, Long Covid arrived and did not leave. Work became impossible. Painting became impossible too. Her world, which had always been large and fast-moving, contracted sharply.

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It was on an iPad, initially out of necessity, that she found her way back. Digital collage requires no standing, no sustained physical effort — just attention and time, both of which she suddenly had in abundance. After two decades of working with the worst of what people do to one another, she found herself drawn obsessively to beauty: to the precise geometry of a reef fish, to the electric blue of a sea slug drifting through cloud, to the particular pink of a cockatoo against soft coral, to the improbable whiteness of a white lion in a white sky.

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Perhaps because her own world had become so small, the abundance of the natural world felt like something worth recording. These collages are that record.

She has since exhibited in Amsterdam and the Leiden region, been featured in the Financial Times and regional press, and been profiled by Digital Arts Blog. She continues to make work from home, one layer at a time.

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About collage 

Collage refers to both the technique and the resulting artwork: the assembly of different shapes, materials and sources into something new and unexpected. Its modern form entered Western art through Picasso, Braque, and the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, though the practice goes back much further. Its founding principles (contrast, repetition, layering) make it uniquely flexible. Anything can be placed next to anything else, and meaning emerges from the tension between them.

 

One principle has become increasingly central to this work: embrace imperfections, because they add character. A seam that does not quite close, an edge that does not quite match, these are not failures. They are evidence that something was made.

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Hester@hesterbrink.nl​​​​