Somewhere, Maybe Here
Tineke Noppers
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Growing up in Coevorden, the Netherlands, she was mainly active studying varieties of bugs, drawing like mad.
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After dropping out of high school, she found herself at the Willem de Kooning Artschool in Rotterdam in 2003 where she started to study illustration. In 2005 she switched to the painting department at The Royal Artschool in Den Haag. She participated in the Erasmus exchange at KabK in Weissensee, Berlin, where she finally learned a lot more than how to perfectly empty the oilpaint tube with a broomstick.
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She returned to Berlin in 2008 to find out that there is more artistic freedom to discover in illustration. In 2014 she became a member of the amazing Stattlab artist collective, where she goes everyday to work on her illustrations and make silkscreen prints.
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All her life she has been positively obsessed with animals and can't stop drawing them up to this day.
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After she became vegan, she tried to integrate political subjects into her work, but found that she couldn't make art out of her sadness and anger. Instead she prefers to focus on showing people how awesome animals are.
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In between silkscreening she makes up stories and characters for children's books. She is currently working on her first hand-drawn animated short.
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About Tineke's work for Somewhere, Maybe Here
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Tineke has contributed 3 silkscreen prints for our crowdfunding campaign. Here's what they're about:
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Animals play a big role in our everyday lives. They bring people comfort, happiness, beauty. But the animal as an individual is being ignored.
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These beings are being harvested for their skin, bodies and secretions. I see raccoon dogs, foxes, and rabbits everywhere on the streets of Berlin, their empty shells decorating coats, shoes and hats, and I was wondering if they turn into angels the they die and if we could regard them as a whole, and live in peace with them.
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So I wanted to make a series of portraits of animals that people use, but are rarely thought of as beings themselves.
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At first I thought how to express that we are surrounded by angels, as I would see an angel as any person with good intentions that could bring joy in our lives even if it's just in the face of a momentary smile. We just have to look at each other without a filter of judgement, because there is a good part to find in most of us.
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I had to reconsider my personal definition of angels, and I realised this series of portraits are the non-human angels. I know they might be far away from the common idea of angels but I see humans and animals as alike and feel the need to life. curtain here, so people can acknowledge their presence everywhere around us. I would like to put a light on the countless individuals that are viewed as sheer material.
Who were they before we took the life out of them?
Tineke Noppers, March 2018
