Saskia Haalebos

4. Saskia Haalebos, The Filling and Disappearing, 2023, 354 screenprints on Stonehenge, photo album sleeves, digital video, print 126mm x 87mm (each), sleeve 402mm x 291mm (each), duration 59 seconds. NFS.

Though of a lake, The Filling and Disappearing (2023) is not about landscape, it’s about love and loss.

But Dr Caren Florance says it best, ‘North of Canberra is an endorheic lake which filled up in the first year of COVID-19, only one of a few times in half a century, and is starting to empty again’. Saskia filmed the lake in winter just after her Nan died, conscious of its imminent disappearance.

‘Don’t be distracted by the spectacle of the animated minute she presents to you, there’s much more to it. Each video frame has been painstakingly separated out, bitmapped for dot screen, transferred to the silk screen, printed once, scanned, and reassembled into light. For me, this attention to detail, these hours of effort, evokes someone gently washing every small surface of a corpse, an exquisite expression of love and care and respect. For Saskia it was a manifestation of the fear of her memories dispersing and disappearing, echoing her Nan’s slow decline over the last five years.’

Saskia Haalebos is a neurodiverse, multidisciplinary artist who uses animation, audio, coding, performance, printmaking, text, zines—whatever the idea calls for around themes of time, mortality, empathy and mis/communication.

Her pinch me moments include the National Gallery of Australia asking her to create a family program for their building’s 40th birthday; being a guest artist for the EXTRA! EXTRA! residency as part of the Kaldor Public Art retrospective at the AGNSW; and having solo exhibitions at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (NSW), Sawtooth ARI (TAS), Sydney Non Objective (NSW) and Megalo Print Studio and Gallery (ACT).

She lives on unceded Ngunnawal Country in the beautiful ACT region of Australia.