top of page

Ernest Anna Bessems

1996
Based in Amsterdam

With the ancient, raw-bodied weight of emotion, With the tension between control and collapse, With the paradox of being human in a time that wants to outgrow humanity, In an age of post religion where the individual and identity wants to be explored and claim its place. My body exists 

My practice explores this between sculpture, installation, drawing , paintings,  and performance with the body as its gravitational center, both as subject and as instrument. The body is where I return to when thought fractures me. It’s the only place that doesn’t seem to bend the truth. Instinct trembles through the body before thought tries to make sense of it.

Materials are like a new layer of skin, it's never neutral. It holds memory, friction, Decay, and softness. It extends the story of the body. I’m drawn to what resists: sand, jute, bronze, reeds, burnt wood, ceramics, concrete I manipulate, break, burn, and bind. like I'm breaking open my body. Other materials, lightweight, flexible, growing serve as a basis. They offer the potential to reshape endlessly, to evolve and dissolve. to modify the body in forms mine can not. 

Emotion in my work isn’t performed. It erupts, like instinct before language. It is the same grief, desire, shame, and rage that moved us thousands of years ago. In that sense, what I make begins personally but lands in something more collective. We all carry fear, just shaped by different words and wounds. Mythology plays a role not to romanticize, but to reveal how little has changed. We are still telling the same stories, just with different tools.

We are evolving quickly technologically, intellectually but our emotions remain slow, raw, and unresolved. And yet, instead of honoring them, we pathologize them. We rush toward post-human and post-emotional futures as if feeling is a burden to shed. But what is left when we remove feeling? What kind of life remains?

My process begins with confrontation. Some emotional impact in the world or within myself. which i cant carry on my body. I sketch, I reflect, I start building. As the work takes shape, it challenges me back. I follow that exchange. My studio is full of fragments: wounds in bronze, bleeding sand, ropes that bind broken skins. I sculpt not to illustrate, but to distill: to embody something that’s felt, but hard to hold.

My background in spatial design and architecture shapes the way I think through material and space. I don’t only sculpt form, I sculpt environment, tension, proximity. I’m always aware of how a body enters, lingers, or withdraws. This sensitivity to structure and transition informs how I build not just objects, but experiences. Whether a work is held in the hand or towers in a room, it’s always in dialogue with the body moving through or around it.

I reflect on a world fragmented by identity, performance, and hyper-individualism. A world addicted to productivity and optimization, yet yearning for rest and meaning. were we become more divided, lonely and misunderstood. My work offers a place to feel. To remember the raw self. To confront discomfort without fixing it. To make peace with the unfinished. 

Sometimes I wonder if my work is part of the problem, feeding into the same self-involved, emotionally saturated culture I critique. But then I remember that honesty, when shared without demand, becomes connection.

WhatsApp Image 2024-11-26 at 22.28.05.jpeg
bottom of page