Cissy Spoelstra

Artist Bio

Cissy Spoelstra is a Dutch photographer, based in Leiden. She studied creative photography at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam and worked as a photographer until march 2020 when she was forced to stay at home due to the pandemic.

This enabled her to finally find the time to start to create, explore, invent and develop all her ideas. Cissy Spoelstra was always interested in alternative photography and started cyanotypes because one just needs the sun, some -environmentally friendly- fluids and paper or other materials to print on. Making cyanotypes is her main occupation now, but she also makes Polaroid emulsion lifts and works in analogue photography.
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Once Cissy Spoelstra started working with cyanotypes, she really got caught up in them! She loves to experiment with a lot of materials.

Artist Statement

Blue is the colour of where you wish to go because you’re not there. It’s the colour of desire, of the horizon, it’s the colour of there, seen from here… So distant and yet so close

How does the theme ‘Biosphere’ play a role in your work?

The project “developed by the sun, washed by the sea” is an ongoing project based on a song from Paul van Vliet called ‘The Sea”.

“The sea spoke up that afternoon, and said: all will be over soon,
so often I am wondering if people know, she said,
about the years of weariness and suffering I had.”
There are days that I’m choked with the waste of the land,
There are days that I feel that the end is at hand,
That’s what the sea said – and she wasn’t even trying,
To hide from me that she is slowly dying”

The tiles are painted with cyanotype fluid and washed in the sea after developing. The tiles represent everything that is build by people. By laying them along the shore and let them be flooded by the sea, they represent the fact that we are dependent on the sea and we have to pay more respect to nature.

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