Joël Bonk – Sculptures – The Netherlands
Born in Zwolle, Joël Bonk (1980) attended the Artez college in Visual Arts, where he left halfway to study in Rotterdam at The Willem de Kooning Academy where he graduated in 2011.
In his work, Joël is investating his personal, cultural and human identity. In every piece of work the starting point is his own body (what he calls ‘the blank canvas’). By using his own form, scale or appearance he tries to examine his own points of view.
“The body is the source of our awareness, inseparably connected with the mind… Everything is perceived through the body (scale and senses).”
(Jos de Mul on embodied cognition in his book ‘Artificial by nature’)
By letting the viewer eat his sculptures (made of baked bread). By making anatomical sculptures without skin (écorché) that need to be touched, or using his own body as a model form or printing matrix.