Fleur Ouwerkerk
Fleur Ouwerkerk (b. 1986) is a visual artist whose work takes many forms such as photography, drawings and sculptures. Ouwerkerk explores the relationships between identity and appearance in her work. Her art is mainly mixed media-based and centers on human behaviour, ethnicity and eccentricity. The raw input is exposed to different forms of interventions and transitions that provide a new appearance for the depicted subject and, in the process, new forms of perceived existence. Ouwerkerk investigates the possibility of altering one’s identity merely by changing one’s appearance; and the possibility of stepping into another role as a different person. In it, she feels allied to a chameleon because of its abilities of transformation. She is guided by lines in the existing imagery that thereby provide a fairly invisible, though pre-set framework as a starting point; identity here becomes forgeable, fluid and malleable.
She graduated from the HKU, Utrecht in 2011 and has since exhibited in various places. In 2015 she was a participating artist in the Framer Framed group exhibition Ancestral Blues – Return to the State of L3 in 2015, curated by Vincent van Velsen. Ouwerkerk has also completed residencies at CBK Zuidoost and De Torenkamer in Amsterdam in 2018. More recently, her work has shifted to wearable art, a piece of which was worn by Sandra St. Victor for her performance at the MET Museum, NY, in 2019.
Fleur Ouwerkerk currently lives and works in Amsterdam.