Joke Raes

Lives and works in Bruges (BE)

Joke Raes is a multidisciplinary artist. She draws, paints, models, assembles, photographs, prints … mainly with organic and floral forms.

Raes worked in the theatre for several years as a designer and performer but she gradually found her place in the visual arts following an under-water exhibition in the Red Sea and a residency among indigenous people living deep inside the Peruvian Amazon. Whenever she travels the world she gets inspired and brings back a new source of information which she projects in her work. During a residency at the ceramic center in Arita/Japan she was fascinated by Japanese masks. This source of inspiration led to her series of fragile but enchantingly detailed porcelain masks.

Several formal themes can be discerned in her other work, like the imaginary line that divides an assemblage or drawing in two halves or corresponding spheres. The resultant pairs of mirrored images are full of tension and desire; Rorschach tests of difference and similarity.