Natasja Mabesoone (b. 1988) received a master degree in visual arts from School of Arts in Ghent and took part in the WIELS residency programme in 2019.
Her work consists of layered etchings and drawings. In the soft ground etchings, known by their French name ‘vernis mous’, various objects, like flowers, fabrics, and embossed paper, are pressed into a varnish before placing the plate into a mordant. This fundamental layer concedes additional imagery (drawings or monoprints) to waft on top of, through or underneath a background made out of coloured soft ground etching. Her pictorial vocabulary derives from bus trips, cartoons, elements of board games, Hannah Weiner, the animal kingdom, the hermetic poems of Stephane Mallarmé, Sudoku and word play. In each work, a different protagonist is staged using seemingly ingenuous depictions of everyday highs and lows. The narrative in her work doesn’t necessarily require a plot. Rather, the narrative potential lies in the imagery, the materiality and the underlying cultural associations or imagination and its etymological framework.”