Amber Veel (1981, NL) – Between Body and Landscape, Matter and Memory
Where does the body end and the landscape begin? This liminal space, where form and identity remain in constant flux, lies at the heart of Amber Veel’s work. In her practice, she explores the fluid, often invisible transitions between human, animal, plant, and environment. By working with and transforming materials such as skin, parchment, glass, and natural found objects, she traces the imprints left by time, decay, and renewal. Her work forms a layered dialogue between art, science, and craft, centring on the interplay between preservation and impermanence.
After studying at the Rietveld Academy, she spent time in the vast forests of Arctic Sweden, where she learned the near-extinct technique of vegetable tanning. This marked a turning point in her work—not just as a craft but as a means to understand the profound connection between body, landscape, and identity. Since then, she has expanded her material research into other transformative processes, such as drawing on self-prepared parchment, preserving botanical structures, and experimenting with prints, casts, and natural conservation techniques.
Veel sees animals and plants as guides in her search for the traces that life and death leave on one another. A deceased gannet found on the shore, a shrivelled duck’s foot, a withered iris—these remnants tell stories of transitions and thresholds, of the temporary and the enduring. Through collecting, drawing, and rearranging, she creates a contemporary wunderkammer in which objects from different realms converge and take on new meanings.
Her work exists at the intersection of art and science. Collaborations with biologists, archaeologists, dermatologists, and conservators allow her to further investigate the layered nature of material transformation. This results in works that are as tactile as they are conceptual: skin becomes landscape, landscape becomes archive, and the past embeds itself within the present as a palimpsest of memories.
Alongside her artistic practice, Veel gives lectures and publishes research questioning the relationship between body and landscape. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Groote Museum-Artis and has been exhibited at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museum Kranenburgh, and Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, among others. In the coming years, she will focus on an in-depth study of the interplay between material, time, and identity, and how these manifest in the visible and invisible layers of our surroundings.
