Judit Hettema

Judit Hettema (Bruchem, 1977) studied at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, at the St. Joost Academy of Fine Art in Breda, and at the HISK Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. In her work she explores the meaning and perception of spaces, often those rarely seen or inaccessible, which have a social or cultural connotation for people. Hettema explores the abstract and architectural meaning of these spaces. By layering different photographs of a certain space on top of each another, complex balanced patterns made out of colour blots emerge, resulting in an image with recognizable painterly quality. This way a new, dreamlike world is created which transcends the specific social-cultural context of the photographed space and reveals different layers of time, space, memory, and consciousness. Hettema was artist in residence at the NIDA Art Colony in Lithuania (2012), the Sunhoo Industrial Design Residency in Hangzhou, China (2012), and Sowing Seeds in Rajasthan, India (2009) and lives and works in Nijmegen, The Netherlands