dindi.

Dutch artist Dindi van der Hoek lives and works in Gouda, The Netherlands. In the surreal water worlds that dindi creates the images evoke confusion despite of its serene frozen state and stillness. In her photographic work she tries to create an inner landscape. In fact, dindi visualizes the duality of an inner paradox; the veil, the layering and the masks of human identity.

Water is a very important part of her photographic work for over the past 20 years.

Dindi: “Water continues to fascinate me and in this I keep researching the impact of water in my work. In fact, water is the only element that I cannot fully control. The water allows both the staged image and the surreal water reflections to balance in an interesting and fascinating way. Water brings a certain spontaneity to my work as well as surrealism and alienation from reality, which allows me to visualize those deeper inner layers. 

Fine art Photographer Dindi van der Hoek is known for her unique and highly distinctive photographic ‘water’ oeuvre. Photographing water reflections has become the main basis of her visual imagery. As a viewer, you become part of surreal images that generate a certain confusion and seem to come from another world. Dindi makes images that are partly photographed underwater.

For years she worked underwater in a swimming pool, but at the end of 2019 she built a water basin of glass in her studio and continued her experiments in it. In this new situation, she investigated the influence of ink and milk in water, creating new images that seemingly effortlessly combine beauty and tranquility with a frayed darkness. Although the end result is physically a two-dimensional image, the path that Dindi takes is one of many layers, like a painter she builds her own world. She arranges all facets of the image: from making costumes, masks and attributes to painting the model. One thing she cannot control and that is the water. The water teaches her to let go of control.

‘With my surrealistic images I take the viewer on an “inner walk”; it is about identity and about masks, masks that people use to consciously or unconsciously cover their true identity. Out of safety or out of fear. The water in my work reflects the apparent reality and the viewer can be taken on a journey through his own illusionary world, such as false identities, limited beliefs or belief systems. Water is the most honest metaphor for life itself. Uncontrollable, transparent and extremely flexible. Working with water has taught me so much in recent years and still does. Water says “Go with the Flow, be transparent, give me space and I’ll carry you”.

I have been experimenting with water for over 20 years and the impact of water in my work still surprises me. It is unpredictable, uncontrollable and indispensable! The water reflections in my work have become a literal mirror and a guide. It is about balance, taking up space and freedom, and above all about letting go of control. Because water is now given more space, my work has become much more playful and clear in recent years.’

Water sometimes tends to abstract forms within the figurative image, thereby giving the images a surreal and oily appearance. These new ‘uncontrollable’ shapes that water causes, free the image and help me to visualize normally invisible complex signals and capture them together in one image.

The desire to merge and balance manifests itself in many guises and always contains this paradox. It is precisely within that apparent being torn that completeness already exist. And this seemingly dual contradiction is precisely wherein it resides. It is within the inexplicable, balancing on the edge of insanity, discord and surrender, that in my opinion, lies the unity.

Within these imaginary worlds that I create, I try to capture and depict these perfectly sculpted inner landscapes into an outer form and image. And so a surrealistic biotope arises in which “the cruel and the beautiful” unite.

During the formation of the ‘Inner Landscapes Series'(2020) arose the opportunity to experiment beyond my working methodes of the past. I appear to become a model myself and started working in a self build water basin instead of the swimming pool I used over the years.
In my work I try to capture and depict an inner landscape in an outer form using portrait, body painting, water and liquids like milk and ink. 

The idea that everything is in a way in relation to each other, of which actions, memories, future, past, life, growth and death take place as a cyclical process and at the same time. I try to let all this grow intuitively in one image. The images are therefor a fullness of actions and yet have the tranquility and acceptance of this multiplicity because it is a cyclical flow.

Dindi (1976) graduated in 1999 from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She is represented by ARWE Gallery in Gouda, Sille Galerie in Oudewater and Pulchri Studio in The Hague. She is also the initiator of the artists’ collective ArtNomaden, with which she independently organizes exhibitions with a kindred group of artists from the Netherlands and Belgium. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally in recent years.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes : “In fact in every woman another woman exists. An external creature and an internal being. One who lives in the upper world and one that lives in a world that is not so easy to identify. The external creature lives by daylight and can easily be detected.
But the internal being usually comes from far to the surface, often suddenly and vanishes equally quickly as it appears. The paradox of this female double nature is that these two women are separately one, but also coupled elements in the psyche that inter-connects in a thousand ways.”