Tienke Zijlstra creates enormous drawings whose boundaries are determined by the reach of her own body. Like a conductor, she sweeps and smears across large sheets of paper with sponges soaked in ink, extending far beyond the edges. Then begins the process of working out, refining, containing and emphasizing. In her recent work, fleshy, lumpy forms proliferate across the paper: they grow, grasp, merge, enclose, clash, dominate, transform—they seem untamable. But not for Zijlstra. However unstoppable and organically expanding her work may appear, she directs this bodily inner world with the healing precision of a surgeon, without sacrificing its vitality.
You feel her work before you understand it. You clutch your stomach without realizing it, imagining yourself inside the entrails of a gigantic beast—or is it yourself? Zijlstra’s work confronts you with your own body, with growth and bleeding, with processes that continue day and night. With the dreadful certainty that all that is of value is vulnerable. And breathtakingly beautiful.

(text: Caren van Herwaarden)

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My drawings emerge from a physical, intuitive way of working: material exploration, repetition, movement, and the direct experience of perception are central. For me, drawing is a form of thinking with the body — a slow, tactile form of research that unfolds not in words, but in traces, lines, and rhythms. My process begins with an intensive phase of concentrated drawing and experimentation, in which movement is essential — not only literally, through the body, but also as a driving force of transformation. While working, I constantly shift between zooming in and out: between closeness and distance, between following a line and recognizing a larger pattern.

Afterward, I cut up most of the material that has emerged, to reassemble it into new compositions. What at first seemed to stand on its own becomes part of a larger whole, in which everything relates to everything else.

This way of working directly reflects the themes within my practice: the tension between the individual and the collective, between fixed form and fluidity, between the idea of autonomy and the reality of interconnection. We live in a world in which we often perceive ourselves as autonomous beings, separate from the larger system — while in truth, everything is constantly in motion, within and around us, and nothing ever exists in isolation.

My drawings serve as a reminder of our humble position within the larger fabric of life: as temporary, breathing presences within a system of mutual dependency. They do not offer a view from above, but an experience from within — from movement, from engagement, as part of what is continuously changing.

(text written by the artist, 2025)

Short impression from 2022/2023 of my way of working. Studio: Horticultural School Frederiksoord.