For Bianca Severijns, nature offers a way of understanding the human experience. Across landscapes, surfaces, and natural cycles, she finds traces of movement, vulnerability, resilience, and renewal. These observations become the starting point for abstract works that explore how experiences accumulate within us and shape our sense of memory, belonging, and place.
Paper lies at the heart of Severijns’ practice. Through a self-developed process, she paints, hand-tears, folds, and layers hundreds of individual pieces of paper into tactile compositions. The repetitive process is both physical and meditative. Torn edges, irregularities, and accumulated layers are deliberately preserved, allowing imperfection to become part of the work. Fragment by fragment, separate pieces gradually form a new whole.
Severijns was born in the Netherlands to a multicultural family and has lived in Israel since 2007. Moving between countries and building a life far from where she grew up have profoundly shaped both her personal perspective and artistic practice. Her connection to the natural world reaches back to the landscapes of her childhood, from the North Sea and the Wadden Sea to forests, fields, and changing seasons. The landscapes and experiences of her years in Israel have added new layers to her visual and emotional vocabulary. Together, these different environments have shaped her ongoing exploration of memory, belonging, vulnerability, resilience, and the meaning of home.
Her earlier practice explored uprooting and displacement more directly, examining parallels between cycles in nature and human experiences of leaving, nesting, protection, and renewal. This exploration led to her signature series Protective Blankets, in which she reimagined the idea of humanitarian first aid through works addressing fundamental human needs such as security, protection, acceptance, dignity, and freedom.
Over time, Severijns’ practice has expanded into a broader exploration of the landscapes we carry within us. Experiences of uncertainty and conflict have inevitably left their traces, but so too have moments of connection, hope, gratitude, and renewal. Erosion and growth, movement and stillness, fragility and resilience recur throughout her work. Rather than functioning as opposites, they exist as interconnected parts of lived experience.
Rather than representing specific places, Severijns creates abstract paper landscapes in which nature, material, and human experience quietly meet. Through repetition, fragmentation, and layering, her works reveal how places and experiences remain within us, forming an inner terrain shaped and reshaped over time.
