Public presentation: Residency for Parent Artists

Public Presentation – Artists in Residency for Parent- Artists
Sunday 7 December 2025 · Oda Park, Venray

We are delighted to invite you to the first public presentation of our Artists in Residency programme for parent artists — a new, dedicated initiative by The Artist and the Others that offers mentorship-based support to artists who are also parent, in this case mothers, allowing them to develop their creative research and professional career alongside their parenting lives.

The participating artists — Verena Blok, Maartje Smits and Rosalie Wammes — have conducted their research during the 3 month residency period and will present their outcomes at Oda Park in Venray on Sunday, 7 December 2025.

The Residency for Artist-Parents marked its first edition, and it is the first project totally tailored to support artists who are also parents.

Programme

14:45: Welcome
15.00: Presentation of the artists’ research by Verena Blok, Maartje Smits and Rosalie Wammes in conversation with The Artist and the Others and curator of Oda Park Joep Vossebeld.
16:30: Small drink.

The event is free and open to all. 

It would be wonderful to have you with us to celebrate the research and creative journeys of these inspiring mother-artists.

About the Artists:

Maartje Smits

Language is always the main material for Maartje Smits, whether she makes videos, chatbot performances, interactive texts, publications or letterpress prints.

Her work is deeply ecofeminist, convinced that our aim for equality should reach beyond the human realm. It often points at situations where Western humans place themselves above or outside of nature and does so with a characteristic light, humorous tone. Crossing an ecoduct – a wildlife crossing designed to allow animals to move safely between habitats without being hit by cars – is not permitted as a human. Maartje does so in her own way, declaring that this illegal act takes the form of a poem.

Maartje’s work has been translated into Spanish, English, Italian, and German. Her books ‘When you’re a girl’ & ‘How I started a forest in my bathroom’ were published by Uitgeverij De Harmonie. She holds a teaching position at Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) & ArtEZ (Arnhem).

Rosalie Wammes 

In her work, Rosalie Wammes wishes to slow down time, replacing minutes and seconds with the hands of memories. Wammes approaches each sculpture as a specific being, a character that is born during the making. Using ancient methods of making, evoking both the visceral and the timelessness.
Like a family or an ecosystem, they act as abstract characters within a scene in which they can only exist with each other. Relating, supporting, or quietly resisting one another, always aware of the meaning the material carries.

Wammes’ sculptures often inspire a performance or a soundpiece. Like in the project There will be Time, a sculptural soundpiece, referring back to a childhood memory or her mum playing the low notes of the organ in church. Or the project The Forgotten Door in which she worked on memory and senses with people dealing with deafblindness. At the moment Wammes is creating a new body of work concerning the balancing act of care, on passing and holding on to each other.

Wammes works in London and Rotterdam and has shown her a.o. at South London Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Showroom MAMA and Het HEM. She is a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award and was selected for New Contemporaries 2022.

Wammes obtained her Master in Fine Arts at Chelsea college of Arts (UAL) in London and holds a BA in performance (Toneelacademie Maastricht). She is also a member of the performance collective The Listening Project.

Verena Blok

Verena Blok carries a deep interest for personal histories and narrative storytelling. Intrigued by the way cultural and political factors influence one’s life, she uses her lens-based practice to shed light on the inner life of people she develops intimate relationships with over time.

The encounter serves as the core of and fuel for her work. Blok uses an analogue small format camera of which its unobtrusive character allows close contact. While embedding herself in specific contexts, small pockets of worlds are formed where both she and her protagonists become part of. Oscillating between portraiture, still lifes, and close-up shots of both objects and bodies, the nuances of human emotion serve as the common thread throughout her work.

As a Dutch-Polish dual citizen, Blok maintains a keen awareness of her positioning between East and West. Her practice is partially inspired by her upbringing in Poland and the USA, where over the years she witnessed shifting ideologies. In dreamlike settings, often with a cinematic quality, Blok seeks out the discomfort and tension within topics that are contested in society, such as the performance of gender and hypermasculinity, coming-of-age, nationalism, and most recently abortion and reproductive rights.
Her projects result in books, photographic works, and short films.

The project is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Het Cultuurfonds and Stichting Oda Park.