UPCOMING! Ecologies

Eveline Kolijn marries science with art; generating through printmaking, video and installation, a fantastical vision of our natural world.

Stimulated by her study of natural science as a creative force, Calgary-based artist and author Eveline Kolijn (BFA '08, Print Media) marries science with art; generating through printmaking, video and installation, a fantastical vision of our natural world.

“The sea permeated my upbringing. I spent my childhood in the 1970s beachcombing along the shores of Venezuela and my teens on the Caribbean island of Curaçao with a lot of scuba diving and snorkeling.”

This lived experience shapes how the Eveline Kolijn views the world: especially the oceans—the ‘lungs’ that sustain life on the planet.

As amateur field naturalists, her family collected and identified seashells in the Caribbean on holidays. Her father, D.L.N. Vink, as an employee of Dutch Shell, an international oil company, started writing to malacologists for information on the shells they found. This contact established for the young Eveline the habit of engagement with the scientific community which carries on in her own work today. She remembers as a teenager knowing hundreds of Latin names of shells by heart: writing little numbers on the shells with India ink and a pen to help with the cataloguing. Later in the 90’s, her father donated 4000 shells to Naturalis, the Museum of Natural History (now Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Leiden, Netherlands).

Eveline Kolijn, Ocean Respiration, 2023. Linocut with phosphorescent Europium pigment on plankton silk and polyester voile; UV light.