Mia Van Veen - F a s c i a e

The new sculptural works of Mia Van Veen are acts of modeling, stretching, manipulating, leading, extending, knotting, and melting. A fascia (from Latin band, plural fasciae) is a band or sheet of connective tissue, beneath the skin that attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates muscles and other internal organs, including the human eye.

In “ F a s c i a e ” Van Veen investigates boundaries existing within human and nonhuman bodies, things and infrastructures. Her man/made/organic fragments exist within, above and underneath bodies, technologies and natural landscapes, constantly negotiating within their surrounding environments. They are guiders, leaders, manipulators, knitters connecting as much as rupturing externally and internally, fissuring and fusing the human body with the natural world.
Even while situated in the protected vicinity of Maridalsvannet—the essential supplier of drinking water in Oslo— “ F a s c i a e ”draws inspiration from quantum physics and its relational world-view. For her installation Mia Van Veen brings forth aqueducts, signals, heatwaves, and quantas. Her focus lays on making visible hidden structures and energies by emphasizing the transformative encounters between living and nonliving matter. She makes a prothesis for water, organs (iris), and plants (iris)–in energy waves on steel, a figure with a heat pool of molten silver and tin. Her concrete skin piece calls up the smallest human cell or a grain of sand—a moment between mind, matter and technologies of nature and its forms. Behind the glass in the diorama, the sculptures model a universe where air, heatwaves and water flow, move below and above earth.


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