As a multidisciplinary artist, I work across mediums. I don’t claim any of them as my own. My practice isn’t about mastery; it’s about the cultural and emotional movements that pass through each form. I’m drawn to the space a material creates, rather than what it defines. For me, space is narrative, a convergence of crafts that builds temporary, intuitive worlds.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Fashion & Branding, where I first became fascinated by trend movements and the ways people respond to societal shifts. I started in fashion because I was obsessed with the dreamworlds created by Galliano, Mugler, and McQueen visions where pain and beauty collided to offer the ultimate escape into something unreal yet deeply felt.
Over time, my focus shifted toward the non-commercial side of creation, though the core remained the same: observing, documenting, and translating emotional and cultural undercurrents. Through installation, bookbinding, and spatial research, I now create archives that holdfragments of memory, transformation, and the longing to exist elsewhere. Even briefly.
I refer to my projects as archives rather than installations, living, evolving structures that emerge through research rather than resolution. These archives are constellations of thought, memory, and perception that shift over time. They hold fragments: images, gestures, texts, materials, and objects that together suggest a larger emotional or philosophical landscape.
Walking, observing, collecting, and translating are central methods, ways to move through the world without forcing conclusions. A piece of broken glass, a hand-bound book, or a ceramic set can all become tools for exploring the invisible systems that shape how we live, connect, and carry ourselves.
I move through the world in observation, translating what I encounter into material form not to solidify it, but to let it breathe in a different way. My work doesn’t aim to explain. It desperately tries to be. To be felt. To be somewhere else. It exists in the unfinished, scared to be defined.
BIO
Contact
Joepvdzalm@gmail.com
+31 6 48 24 23 92