KARIN VAN DEL MOLEN: MESHWORK AS PRACTICE. REWEAVING CONTEMPORARY ART THROUGH MAKING-WITH SITE, MATTER, AND MEANING

| By Elena Redaelli |

Karin van der Molen’s practice moves fluidly through contemporary art’s mediums and categories. She treats definitions as working edges, reshaping them as meanings emerge. Sculpture can function as an ecosystem, installation can hold encounters, and materials act as active partners with their own tempo, resistance, and demands. What links her trajectory is not a single signature form, but a method: a commitment to making-with. With others, with specific sites, with the agency of materials, and with the layered meanings places carry through history, labor, and lived experience.

The term meshwork captures this approach with peculiar precision. Anthropologist Tim Ingold describes meshwork as an entanglement of interwoven lines, lines of movement, growth, and wayfaring, rather than a set of predefined points linked by static joints. (Ingold, 2011) Relations unfold as lived paths that interlace over time. In van der Molen’s work, meaning emerges through interdependence: between sites, local histories, and collective creative encounters, as well as human and more-than-human agencies. Lines meet, knot, fray, and continue.

Reading her work through textile in the broadest sense makes this meshwork tangible. Textile appears as a technique that crosses plant fibers, recycling old textiles, and large-scale stitching. It is present as material, willow, hay, carpets, and domestic cloth. It appears as situated knowledge, bringing to the surface stories of ecology, migration, peacemaking, local memory and friendship. Textile also functions as a conceptual method, especially in collaborative contexts, and as a structural ethic. Weaving and repair become ways of composing with forces that exceed the artist.

Van der Molen’s trajectory makes this approach legible across time and contexts. After studying international law with a specialization in Human Rights at the University of Amsterdam and later studying art at the Vrije Academie in The Hague, she developed a practice that treats place as a co-author. Works produced through residencies, outdoor commissions, and international projects evolve through research, on-site improvisation, and attention to local materials and socio-cultural histories. (…)

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