About me
My name is Mireille Schermer. I love to work in nature and with nature. In my ‘Nature Works’ I look for the connection between art and nature and I aspire to create sustainable works, that blend into their surroundings, eventually becoming part of it again.
I make installations of ‘found’ materials such as tree stumps, driftwood or roots, or material earning a second life such as wooden panel doors. I work with what crosses my path in a intuitive manner. In this way small objects, power objects or paintings take shape, but also organically grown ‘site specific’ installations such as ‘Bee Good’ that I made for the Circular Change Conference in Slovenia, a ‘beekeeping’ country. Four on every thousand inhabitants is a beekeeper in Slovenia. Or my installation ‘Roots’, constructed with bramble roots from the bramble overtaken studio garden.
While creating art, I feel motivated by the quest and the freedom involved. The point of departure when working on an artwork is the feeling of touring around, both in a literal and figurative sense. Compare it to covering a huge distance to for instance the Amazon rain forest, which I feel closely connected to, or to the feeling I have when combing the beach or strolling through the sand hills in the area I grew up in. The artworks I make mirror the exploratory expedition of life itself, the imaginary excursions and innermost outings such as dreams and visions, at times shamanic in nature. I experience this feeling of freedom while travelling but also while doing a painting as the process of collecting materials and creating itself resembles the feeling of going on a trip.
For years I experienced the holistic way of jungle life and it became a fundament in my life. My growing knowledge about herbs and the healing powers of plants and trees in my direct surroundings become more and more integrated in my work, like in my most recent research on ‘herbs’ and what they teach us. To deeply understand this and to connect with the plants, I use the roots in my installations, I make oil of the flowers, collect the berries and dry the leafs for tea and I paint them.
It is the cycle of life that goes to the heart, it is the harmony of the repetitive cycle, the perpetual cycle of nature. My amazement is registered in archetypes recounting a story of growth, movement and transformation. Nature Works!