Birgitta's works on paper talk about our ambiguous relationship to touch, from the plain gestures we make with our hands and fingers, the things they sense and the reactions they put in motion, to our overall human need for physical contact. While certain works will reveal bodily qualities and play with sensations of closeness, others purposely create a particular kind of estrangement.
Applying varying degrees of contact and pressure, Birgitta takes full advantage of the multi-directional properties of paper and its unique power in the transfer of information. Her process and her thinking are strongly driven by printmaking. The tools she uses are knives and blades, which sense the minute topographical characteristics of the picture plane while her gestures shape and sculpt the image. In the process, Birgitta records tactile events, often making visible the seemingly insignificant or the invisible, which are key to the human experience. As the blades leave noticeable traces of their subsequent passage on the surface, they function as a testimony of travels back and forth between past and present.
Birgitta was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Morocco, Mexico and Chili. While working as a graphic designer in New York, she was introduced to printmaking at the School of Visual Arts. She chose to focus on one-of-a-kind prints, creating monotypes which she showed for the first time in 2008, in the group show Tracing Places (Haarlem, The Netherlands). While printmaking is still part of her practice, Birgitta currently produces paintings on paper. She lives and works in France.