An Exclusive Interview with Bianca Severijns

"In my hands and between my fingers, paper feels like a superpower medium that enables me to convey my artistic vision with a mixture of seriousness with whimsy, abstract with concrete, the personal with the universal." - Bianca Severijns

- By Anastasia Tsypkina

Bianca Severijns is a contemporary artist who transforms paper into intricate, complex artworks that create a unique visual impact.

Severijns is known for her original and distinguished paper language, with which she aesthetically arranges hundreds of hand-torn pieces of paper into sculpture tapestries, murals, and reliefs. Her works explore subjects of displacement, uprooting & re-rooting, and social themes.

Severijns was born in the Netherlands and currently works and lives in Israel. While it was her choice to uproot from the Netherlands, her experiences as a new immigrant in a new homeland were the inspirational foundations from which her paper artwork sprouted.

Her contemporary paper art journey began as a study of the cycles of nature and progressed to social and humanistic themes.

In her earlier pieces, Severijns sought to analyze the theme of displacement and how the stages of nature intertwine with human conditions such as forced uprooting, nesting, and revival.

As a quest for a deeper and more profound exploration of the displacement theme, she started to examine the fundamental basic needs of people who are displaced. Her recent artworks concentrate on a re-conceptualization of a humanitarian first need.

For the exhibition

Personal Structures – Identities at the 2019 Venice Biennial, she created a wall installation of two large protective blankets and a video as a metaphor to convey fundamental human rights and needs of security, protection, acceptance, respect, freedom, etc.