Anna van der Ploeg is a contemporary artist from South Africa, currently based in Brussels.

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Van der Ploeg is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily across sculpture, painting, writing and public interaction. Her practice is driven by an interest in societal imagination, community and the relationship between mental image and language.

Van der Ploeg creates physical artworks that engage with ideas of authorship by the public, the human impulse to find concrete forms for speech and the representation of a writing praxis. Her practice is studio-based and embodied. Artworks emerge through exploration, intensive and specialised working processes. Anna responds to commonplace materials with a technical ability that allows her to transform them into poetic devices. In recent projects, the artist’s attention has been focused on plywood – carving, bending, and painting it to combine elements of sculpture with painting. This process tracks an immaterial research on linguistic theory and form.

Van der Ploeg’s work is a continual engagement with the idea of the artwork as autonomous and her own experience of the world shaped by words. A sentence from Heidegger is etched in the mind: “The inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed”. Anna’s studio practice is a manifestation of this: attempts to draw a circle around something in the air with a finger.

Beyond the studio, Van der Ploeg facilitates experimental visualisation sessions under the name sightseeing.hyperlocal. The sessions are similar to a drawing class, but lying-down, closed-eyed, and the medium is the mind. This contributes to research on imagination and also forms the basis of an ongoing multi-authored text piece.