Margriet Craens (1988) studied Dutch language and culture at the University of Amsterdam and visual arts at Sint Joost in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. She lives and works as an artist, researcher and writer in Eindhoven.
The art of Margriet Craens balances on the border between reality and fantasy. She exposes the underlying, apparent obvious. This creates space for new experiences and a fresh perspective. With a lot of humor and deceptive naivety, Craens forms an alternate to larger stories.
In 2021 Margriet Craens drove for five weeks straight through Friesland in our SRV car. Her project focused on the Dutch export product cheese. While driving, Craens visited Frisian cheese farmers, cheese sellers and cheese consumers. She gradually discovered that cheese, in addition to being food, also has a spiritual role. She was inspired by the hole patterns you see when you cut a slice of cheese. The patterns resembled constellations. Can you see it as well when you look closely?
Did you know: the link between spirituality and cheese appears to exist for centuries. In the Middle Ages, cheese fondue seems to have been used to predict the future.
Photo: Heleen haijtema