Elise Bikker, Ph.D.
Elise Bikker is a visual artist originally from the Netherlands and now based in the United Kingdom. She regards herself as a visual storyteller. Her latest pastel drawings accompany a body of creative texts she is currently working on, exploring the emotions resulting from the inevitable passing of time and the transience of existence: loss, grief, isolation, the power of memory, and man’s desire to find his place in the universe.
Elise is interested in what the analytical psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) defined as the "shadow": the repressed parts of the unconscious mind that remain hidden to ourselves. In her recent work, this shadow takes the form of machines, hybrid creatures, or an ancient, solitary figure visiting places from his past. The abandoned places in which this figure finds himself symbolise these unexplored parts of the psyche and man’s search to know himself.
In her visual language, regarding the transgressing of existential boundaries and the question of what constitutes “life,” Elise draws from her Ph.D. in English on the representation of intelligent machines in nineteenth-century fiction (University of York, 2023), as well as art history, mythology, folklore, literature, alchemical symbolism, and other allegorical narratives.
Elise’s sometimes magic-realist, sometimes darkly romantic imagery is everything but devoid of hope: she emphasises the strength and resilience of the human spirit and poses love, curiosity, and the transformative creative process – with the immortal Muse as its personification – as means to circumvent the decay imposed by time, i.e. as meaningful antidotes to suffering.
