Mieke van den Hoogen

Mieke van den Hoogen was born in Breda. In 1987 she started studying ceramic design in Maastricht. Subsequently, in 1991, she completed this training with an exhibition in the Art Academy, which is associated with the Maastricht University of Applied Sciences.
She has had her own studio since 1992.

Mieke:
"Through my studies at the academy, I was particularly fascinated by the expressive possibilities of the thin shard. The process of rolling the clay, the use of ceramic pigments and natural elements, like sand and seedlings, gives the pieces clay a certain expression, which I use when building a statue.
Women and vases play an important role in my work.
In the female images I strive for a combination of naturalistic elements and abstracted forms and emotions. A female image does not interest me if it reflects an ideal of beauty, but precisely if it is a representation of a body, a body in which people live.
A body appears to be constructed symmetrically; yet as no day feels the same, I want to express that by building it up asymmetrically.
Because the female statues have a ceramic, ie hollow structure, the content must be expressed in the shard. The image is not an empty vessel, not a shell. In the shard I represent the interior, as thin as possible and fragile.
The vases are also constructed as thin as possible, also asymmetrically, sometimes fired in aluminum foil with wood and flower residues. I often make drawings of women on the vases, which get a contrasting color and for some time I also make the vases of porcelain, rolled out and built up, as thin as possible.
Every year I have a number of exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad.