The M-residency of Anna van der Ploeg

M offers Anna van der Ploeg a five-month residency at Cas-co. Van der Ploeg (°1992, Cape Town) works primarily with the mediums of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. She’s interested in human interaction and inscription, and how they relate to prescribed roles, scripts and dialogue.

M-resident Anna van der Ploeg in an working space — © Anna van der Ploeg

Anna van der Ploeg (°1992, South Africa) lives in Brussels and works in Leuven. She graduated from KASK in 2022 with a Master Fine Arts. Prior to this, she obtained her Bachelor Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town. She participated in several group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad and has work in the collection of the V&A Museum and the South African National Bank amongst others. In 2023, she was artist in residence at David Krut Workshop in South Africa.

Van der Ploeg explores the precarity of interactions between strangers and acquaintances. In recent projects, this fascination manifested in research into tables - an object that facilitates encounter and exchange - and Do It Yourself posters.

Her process is labour-intensive and specialized. After some years working across mediums, she developed her method of carving and painting plywood, combining elements of sculpture with painting, influenced by woodblock printmaking.

In the M-residence, Van der Ploeg will continue her research on DIY posters. Since computers and printers became widely accessible, posters have become ubiquitous in the street scene: 'the missing poster', 'the wanted poster' and the searches related to jobs, pets or events.

Work of M-resident Anna van der Ploeg — ‘In absentia’, Anna van der Ploeg, 2022 © the artist

In a not unrelated way, posters create a portrait of the community, of its immediate offerings and needs. They mediate exchange between strangers in a way that is hyper-local, analogue, and unfiltered by algorithm. Van der Ploeg researches how posters are used as a means of interpreting interactions between humans and are also the material residue of dialogue at the same time.

Anna tells about her residency