As a child I yearned for a pair of x-ray glasses so that I could look through the clothes and the skin of other people. For it is there, inside, that the ideas and the emotions, the driving force of our bodies, are found. Invisible but very much present. What makes this possible?

         To find an answer to this enigma I took, in the nineties, the initiative to spend several years drawing in the anatomical collections of the University of Leiden. It was not so much the anatomy itself that interested me as what could be expressed through it. Thus I began a an exploration through the collections as to how the body reacts toward themes such as consolation, fear, resistance and surrender. These are the emotions through which we as human beings learn how to interact with others, with grief and, for example, the prospect of death. That sounds heavy-handed but I have an urge to find a form for these through my work. 

         I make drawings and collages with mixed techniques. A drawing is the thinnest of layers; it is actually nothing. I love drawing, I love too that ambivalence in the Dutch words – tekenen to draw and beteken to mean - drawing and meaning. You be-teken something or draw meaning from something. Because you set down on paper the images in your head or those that are around you, you draw out their meaning.

-translation Lin Widmann-