Through her multidisciplinary and sometimes site-specific works, Merijne Spits builds installations in which she approaches big and overwhelming concepts with personal memories and interpretation. A lot of her works are focussed on the universe and universal ideas such as (the beginning of) time. By making them personal, for example by connecting the beginning of time to the beginning of her own life, Spits processes these heavy concepts. Memories from childhood therefore appear abundantly throughout her work, such as the plastic stars or dino-bandaids that are reminiscent of the late 1990s in which the artist grew up.
The choice for particular materials stems from Spits’ understanding of humans as collectors of time: either by holding on to immaterial memories or by collecting matter from time past, the human relationship with the past is crucial to how we define ourselves. Therefore, both in her installations and individual works, she is fond of structures that encapsulate in a temporal sense, ranging from paraffin sculptures that hold actual remains from the past of the artist, to the way in which her works are held by the space for the duration of their exhibition.

Text by Menno Vuister

Work shown under text:
Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?
Paraffin, stearin, paper, paper tape, dried plants, plastic
24 x 32 cm