Amber Veel (1981, St. Pancras) explores in her artistic practice the fluid, often invisible transitions between human, animal, plant, and environment. Where does the body end and the landscape begin? What traces do they leave on one another, and how do these dissolve into each other?
Veel works with and transforms materials such as skin, parchment, glass, and natural objects, making tangible the imprints left by time, transience, and renewed growth. In her work, a layered dialogue arises between art, science, and craftsmanship, with the central theme being the dynamic between decay and preservation.
Through collecting found objects during her wanderings through nature, material research, and drawing, she seeks answers to these questions—answers that are never fixed but constantly in motion, and thus subject to change and decay.
After graduating from the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she spent time in the vast forests of Arctic Sweden, where she immersed herself in the technique of vegetable tanning: a traditional, seventeenth-century craft. In collaboration with biologists, archaeologists, and dermatologists, she investigates the layered nature of material transformation, placing her work at the intersection of art and science. The result is pieces that are both tactile and conceptual: skin becomes landscape, landscape becomes archive, and the past imposes itself on the present like a palimpsest of memories.
Commissioned by VHDG, Veel is developing new work for the exhibition Grensverleggers (Boundary Shifters), in which she focuses on salt marshes as transitional zones between our land, the Wadden Sea, and our human relationship to them. These fertile plains of sea clay and silt can flood during high tide and dry out again during low tide. What occurs beneath the crackled surface that results? And how does this dynamic landscape relate to a human body?
“In the fault lines of the salt marsh sediment, I found the echo of my own skin.”
To support her artistic practice, Veel gives lectures and publishes texts in which she questions the relationship between body and landscape. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Groote Museum-Artis and has been exhibited at, among others, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museum Kranenburgh, and the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. In 2024, Amber Veel was the winner of the Victoriefonds Visual Arts Culture Prize.
