Karin van Dam
Karin van Dam (1959) is known for her installations composed with materials such as buffers for boats, rope and insulating casing. At one time she even used entire pre fab polyester ponds which she hung in the medieval hall of centre for contemporary arts De Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Netherlands. She sees her installations as spatial drawings, the viewer can walk through these drawings, as it were. The installations are prepared in pencil drawings on a small format. Here she also often integrates objects like rubber plugs, rope or wooden sticks.
End 2009 Karin van Dam worked as an artist in residence in Tokyo; she was immediately intrigued by the fragility of this metropolis, where the sky scrapers are supported by huge springs to make them earthquake-proof. She imagined this as a fine-meshed structure underneath the city, and represented it in small drawings on paper, in which she also incorporated objects such as thimbles, rope, satay sticks and photo fragments. In addition, she had a large number of very detailed street maps partly punched out, which she subsequently wove together and hung on the wall. With the recent television pictures from Japan of the devastated coastal cities this work gets a poignant actuality.