Julie van der Vaart

In 1417, the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered in the library of a secluded monastery in southern Germany the manuscript of a great forgotten work. De rerum natura (On the nature of things), the poem by the Latin Lucretius which embodied the atomistic theory of Democritus and the materialistic worldview of Epicurus. According to this conception, a whole explanation of the universe and a philosophy of human life was established that rejected the fear of gods and death. The structure of reality consisted of atoms, emptiness and nothing else. That book influenced the cultural and ideological change that led to modernity and current scientific theories.

 

One of the physicists who created the theory of loop quantum gravity, Carlo Rovelli, in his book Reality is not what it seems, writes: ‘This immense dance of atoms has no purpose, no purpose. We, like the rest of nature, are one of the many results of this infinite dance’.

A quote taken up by the photographer Julie Van der Vaart to present her work The dance. A series of cyanotypes on Japanese Kozo paper that aims to show the internal conflict of the author, who oscillates between her passion for science and a sometimes repressed spiritual need.

 

Cyanotype is a monochrome photographic process for obtaining prints in Prussian blue. Curiously, it was invented by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842, and it was the botanist Anna Atkins who immediately put it into practice to document ferns and other plants.

A process of technical-scientific origin that Julie Van der Vaart incorporates to demonstrate the physical materiality of her work based on experimentation with analogue image development techniques.

Her themes are the subjectivity of time, the immensity of the cosmos, mortality, nature, science and the search for spirituality.

This series shows photographs of cosmic significance and an evident timeless effect: fragments of naked bodies that seem to vanish in space and eternal landscapes outside the limits of time. An indissoluble yet evanescent nature.