Jelle creates images that are like tactile dreams. Jelle creates a poetic world where only feeling counts, and everything else disappears. Her work is minimalist and fragile, inviting the viewer to come closer and discover her world. In that world, her gaze often rests on the small. The beauty in the details that are often overlooked in our existence. Her images exude simplicity, tranquility and wonder, but for the attentive viewer they also bear witness to a certain layering and mystery, hidden in a feeling that accompanies an image or in a title that gives something away.
In essence, Jelle is looking for the perfectly balanced image that strikes in its simplicity. She therefore sees herself as an ‘image collector’. Someone who collects fragments of images, dissects them and composes them into a new image. It is an intuitive way of working in which she tries to translate an underlying feeling into an image that reveals just enough.
Two themes are very present in her work. Human nature and the surrounding nature. Both are unmistakably connected and in her work these themes and the tension between them regularly overlap. By leaving out everything superfluous, by reducing her to her essence, Jelle tries to understand reality. As a result, her work often balances on the border between the figurative (what is recognizable) and the abstract.
Her images are personal solutions in the sense that the search for beauty and simplicity offers her a personal way out of the chaos of reality and out of the inner chaos. That chaos is universal and typical of life / being human and by making and showing these images, Jelle hopes that they touch, refer to other realities and also offer the viewer a way out. Jelle therefore likes to leave the exact interpretation of an image to the viewer.
“For me, the beauty of creating is mainly in looking, discovering and observing the small. There is a hidden layer of life in the details that we pass by more often than we think about. I collect the small in order to give it a greater meaning.”