Sanne Rietveld is a contemporary visual artist working between Cornwall and Cardiff. Her fluid and experimental practice shows a fictional approach to real issues, aiming to unpick the complexities of the everyday through inventive imagery.

 

The fundamental themes of her work are human’s relationship to the environment, and the female psyche, influenced by her experiences as a young woman from a rural background. Her practice is collaborative in nature, and she is fundamentally concerned with creating provoking imagery through the use of metaphors and symbolism in her work. 

 

 Loud colours and intimate crops are defining characteristics of her practice and she often enjoys to pick at finer details, utilising colour analogue photography for its tonality and grain.

Mother Nature is an inquiry into women's instinctual nature, our need to be in the presence of one another in times of difficulty and fear, and our dependence on the natural world for our sanity.

 

Collaboratively making photographs during the first Covid‐19 lockdown, my mother, grandmother and I record our experience of staying home, and inject play into documenting the domestic. I have always been moved by my mother and grandmother's love of gardening, and how they poke with blackened fingers into the soil, tucking roots into the earth like they once tucked me into bed.

 

During this global crisis our small garden became our Utopia, and nothing was more relished than the daily walk. Picturing these walks, and our garden, I contemplate nature as representative of a woman's wild psyche. In our garden I watch my mother and grandmother give and take life, moving with the exhalations of the wild nature. Similarly to how a garden is susceptible to infestations and droughts, at present human beings face an invasion.

 

However, despite such disasters, the garden is a reminder that regrowth is always possible, and that the world will heal. For the time being my mother, grandmother and I hold each other close and engage with each other and with our creativity through the making of these photographs.

Photography 

30x30cm

Framed