Bianca Severijns is a Dutch born artist who lives in Israel. While it was her choice to uproot from the Netherlands, her experiences as a new immigrant creating a home in a new country were the inspirational foundations from which her paper artwork sprouted. She transforms paper into intricate, complex artworks that create a unique visual impact. Severijns is known for her original and distinguished paper language, with which she aesthetically arranges hundreds of hand-torn pieces of paper into sculpture tapestries, murals, and reliefs. Her works explore subjects of displacement, uprooting & re-rooting, and social themes.

Bianca Severijns medium is paper pieces, hand-torn with a gentle physicality that removes the newborn softness and creates a unique ruggedness that contains encounters, travels, reflections, love, loss and happiness. Each layer is composed of paper pieces in all shapes and sizes, which serve as a basis for the next layer, minute, day, year or experience. Everything is dynamic, a manifestation of the patterns, rhythm and exploration that is life. Everything is stop, regulation and boundary-free. It is a process steeped in femininity and labor, which attempts to reach the ultimate goal of purity and peace, not settling for anything less than the glorious artistic multi-dimensional adventure.

The identity of paper as a material is flexible, and in Bianca’s case, it is used more as a language than a mere surface. She manipulates blank sheets with her own hands, tearing them apart, one by one, to piece together her next project. To her, a sheet of paper is its own landscapes, filled with nuance and variety in texture. As an artist, she is conscious of the plight of humanity no matter where it originates or what context it plays out in. By representing those who are wrongfully expelled, targeted, cast away or ignored, Severijns makes her message universal. Her paper objects remain objects, but their presence takes on a human-like nature thanks to the ideals that inhabit them. Her pieces, whether they are blankets, vases, tapestries or wearables, take on the role of a vessel, fragile and weighted at the same time.