VISUAL ARTIST
ANTWERP / BE
Ilse Donders is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist based in Antwerp.
Her work begins long before she touches a material. A form can live in her body for days as a pressure in the stomach, present but still without an image. When she finally starts, there is no fixed plan to execute. She works by instinct and allows her hands to discover what the work is becoming.
Donders received her early artistic foundation at PIKOH, Kunsthumaniora Hasselt, but developed her practice independently. She works across sculpture, painting, drawing and self-portraiture, moving between materials whenever the work demands it.
Skin is central to her visual language. For Donders, it is the most honest part of the body. It records weight, strain, age, touch and time. It stretches, folds, bruises and sags. It can protect what is underneath, but it cannot erase what has been lived.
Her figures are distorted without becoming dishonest. Their weight, asymmetry and exposed surfaces resist the polished body. Through clay, acrylic paint and mixed media, she searches for a form that feels integral rather than ideal.
Vulnerability in her work is never passive. She sees the willingness to be seen without disguise as something courageous and strong.
I keep returning to skin because skin cannot lie. It carries everything. Weight, age, pressure, desire, damage, tenderness and time remain visible in it. To me, flesh is not a surface that needs to be perfected. It is evidence of having lived.
I twist and distort the body to move closer to something honest. I am not interested in ugliness for its own sake. I am interested in the moment a body stops performing and becomes present. Heavy, awkward, exposed and entirely itself.
I build, scrape, press, sand, repaint and sometimes break what I have made. I follow the form instead of forcing it back towards the original idea. Control gives me a beginning, but surrender is usually where the work becomes alive.
There is integrity in vulnerability. Allowing yourself to be seen without disguise is not weakness. It is one of the most courageous things a body can do.
I make art because the need does not leave. Even when there is no time, the work continues somewhere inside me. Making is how I give that pressure a body.