Badriah Hamelink. Photo: Mitia Dedoni
Badriah Hamelink comes from a family of Dutch intellectuals. Her mother is a professor, while her father is the poet and writer Jaques Hamelink. Her grandmother founded the first Arab study centre in the Netherlands.
Her own artistic development however has leant more towards the intuitive than the rational, and when she followed her nose to Pietrasanta she sought mentoring from the artist Armen Agop. Badriah also credits Martin Foot who taught her many carving techniques.
Badriah Hamelink, OBEX 3, 2020, mixed media, 40 × 100 × 100 cm
Badriah's abstract style explores the essence of our existence, and what lies beneath.
Badriah Hamelink, A3A, 2008–18, mixed media, 36 × 18 × 8 cm each
The piece A3A is visible from both sides. The two objects act as a duet and, as is often the case with kindred spirits, the apparent similarity of the objects also directs the viewers' attention to their minute differences.
Badriah Hamelink, A11, 2020. Music: Vanessa Amara
Recently Badriah had a near-fatal accident due to a four-and-a-half metre fall resulting in heavy concussion. While recovering, she started playing around with and reworking old images she'd taken. By 'mirroring' some of them, she discovered the importance of reflection and symmetry as a way of expressing balance and equanimity.
Badriah Hamelink, OBEX 4, 2020, digital montage print, 100 × 100 cm
Badriah found that if you hold a shape against a mirror you immediately see something organic – even the most inorganic surface will seem to produce an organism in front of your eyes. It’s what our minds are wired to do.
Badriah Hamelink, PROLIFERATIO, 2019, salt and mixed media, 120 × 200 × 150 cm
The first piece that Badriah made after her accident was PROLIFERATIO which consists of a block of two tons of salt, split in half and a cast of the rupture in black polyester. Where the pure and natural salt has opened up, the black synthetic proliferates out of its core, as if a tumour growing at the same speed as the mineral. It seems to suggest: 'At the moment of birth our death is born as well' which, Badriah says, is the only certainty we have. This work is currently in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Sotto Sale, Sicily.
Badriah Hamelink, A5B.2, 2011–19, mixed media, 56 × 38 × 2.5 cm. Photo: Nina de Raadt
The relief, A5B.2, was inspired by photographs from the Hubble deep space telescope of two extraordinarily thin galaxies, NGC 4452 and OPO 0624. Badriah created a heightmap of the visual data and based a sculpture on it’s features. The work re-materializes the far-away light sources to throw a rippling onto the physical surface.
In 2017 Badriah founded Atelier BSH which continues to produce her artworks in stone and metal. Her work has been displayed in galleries and museums in New York, Luxembourg, Stockholm, Milan, Prague, Hawaii and Amsterdam.
Constantly experimenting with new materials and always driven to further her career as an artist, Badriah recently applied herself to learning the ancient Japanese art of stone splitting.
Rocca di Sala, the walled fortress on the hillside just above Pietrasanta centre where Badriah took refuge when she first arrived with a backpack in 2007
Links
instagram.com/badriah_hamelink
Badriah is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors
Credits
Producer: Sarah Monk
Sound edit/design: Guy Dowsett
Music: courtesy of Audio Network
Gravity Lift 3252/7, Nathan Feddo and Henry White
Desert Sky 3 1866/21, Bruce Maginnis
Unless credited otherwise, all photos: Badriah Hamelink
It was quite a conceptual art school. I would ask them: Can you teach me how to weld? They said: No. We have rules and regulations. Tell us where to weld it and we’ll do it for you.
Badriah Hamelink:And that was hugely disappointing to me because I wanted to do it myself. I was frustrated and I was talking to a friend of mine, an artist. He said: You know where you should go. You should go to Pietrasanta. I had no plan really.
Badriah Hamelink:I just hitchhiked here with only my backpack. And didn’t really have a place to stay. So I went up to La Rocca and climbed over a wall. I slept there. There was a bunch of old catalogues lying around.
Badriah Hamelink:In them was the address of Armen’s studio. I went over and I said: Hi, I really like your work and I want to learn something from you. So here I am.
Badriah Hamelink:It felt like I got a second chance at life. So I asked myself what was the thing that you were most passionate about?
Badriah Hamelink:What did you really want to do with your life? And it was art, so I feel like I’m back on track actually. The shock was that I was mortal. I never really realized that I was mortal. Was still thinking that I was immortal.
Sarah Monk:Hi, this is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today I’m meeting Badriah Hamelink, a young Dutch artist who lives and works in The Hague. She first made her way to Pietrasanta hitchhiking with a backpack and not much else in 02/2007. I chatted with her late last summer when we were free to move around. We struggled to meet because I had to do an airport run.
Sarah Monk:Many places were still closed, and to compound our frustration that morning, we woke to torrential rain. However, I was so glad we made it happen. Badriah’s determination as well as her work is inspiring. She is known for her minimal yet monumental style and recently mastered the Japanese technique of stone splitting. Her inspiration is dealing with the nature of being.
Badriah Hamelink:My name is Badriah Hamelink. I’m an artist.
Sarah Monk:What inspires you? What are the things that inspire pieces of art for you?
Badriah Hamelink:Well, for example, recently I went hiking in Garfagana and I saw all these incredible rock formations and there was this power, this absolute power of the universe. The power that pressed everything together and made mountains rise up. There’s something very fascinating about that to me.
Sarah Monk:And how would you describe your work?
Badriah Hamelink:I made an evolution from very distinct shapes towards work where I don’t so much give shape to the stone, but I invite coincidence by breaking it and then working with it. So it’s a controlled coincidence.
Sarah Monk:Do you discover something in the stone or do you have an idea, a sort of something that you wish to create that you put into the stone? Are we talking about that, that collusion where the stone inspires something and then out of that your creativity kicks in?
Badriah Hamelink:Not really. I never really worked like that. I always worked from the idea. And I think the idea has gotten stronger in a sense that first they were really one. The idea and the object had to be one.
Badriah Hamelink:That was very important to me. Now I create works where the idea is leading and the material is a consequence of that. I would not just look at a stone and then get an idea. I would start out with the idea, but I will break the stone. That’s something that I’m doing now.
Badriah Hamelink:I break the stone, and then I work with the result. But there is already a significance to it and a meaning to it that’s premeditated.
Sarah Monk:What stones do you choose and why?
Badriah Hamelink:I always choose stones that are very homogeneous because I feel that they don’t distract from the shape too much. So I really love Bianco P. It’s a white marble with hardly any veins. And the black granite, of course very different to work with, but it really has a charm as well. You have to go straight to the skin and then finish it off.
Badriah Hamelink:With marble, there is more space for trying things out. It’s less absolute. With granite, you have to really know exactly what you’re going to do and you do it. Then you get really, really good results because it’s maybe from one side very unforgiving, but from the other side it really enables you to work in a very refined manner.
Sarah Monk:Where were you born?
Badriah Hamelink:I was born in Amsterdam.
Sarah Monk:You lived there ever since?
Badriah Hamelink:No, actually, I moved when I was one to Ilpendam, and then my parents split up when I was three and then I moved to The Hague. I lived there until I was 18.
Sarah Monk:Are your parents artists? How were your early influences to become an artist? How did that come about?
Badriah Hamelink:I was 11 or 12, my mom had enrolled in a sculpture class and I went along. And as the teacher saw that I really liked it, at some point he gave me a stone. It was a grey piece of soapstone. I saw a dove in it. It looked like a dove to me.
Badriah Hamelink:So I made a dove. That was my first work in stone. I think I was 12. My father is a writer. He’s a poet, actually.
Badriah Hamelink:Both of them are Dutch professors. There was always a lot of art in the house. For example, we had a print. I think it was a litho print by Francis Bacon. And my father loved this print and my mother hated it.
Badriah Hamelink:Every time that she would clean the house, she would take it off the wall and turn it around. And then when my father would see the damage done, he would restore it, put it back up. The silent battle went on for quite a while.
Sarah Monk:What did you think of the painting?
Badriah Hamelink:This is a strange painting. To a little girl, I couldn’t make much sense of it. But I’ve grown to love it now.
Sarah Monk:And so your childhood, did you go to a normal school or did you go to an art school early on?
Badriah Hamelink:It was a Waldorf school. I don’t know if you know about that. They have got a more intuitive way of learning and there’s a lot of attention for art as well. Actually, you’re supposed to stay in that school from the first grade until you’re 18 years old. But I changed schools when I was 12 and then I went to the gymnasium, like a Lyseum.
Sarah Monk:Okay.
Badriah Hamelink:And there was a lot of classical art. I remember coming into this building and there was this Greek sculpture in the hallway and I was very impressed. I thought, wow, that’s a cool school. I want to go there. Yeah, a lot of attention for the classics.
Sarah Monk:And what did you enjoy the most? The art?
Badriah Hamelink:Definitely Yes. Yeah, definitely art. And also biology and philosophy. Those were my three favorites.
Sarah Monk:What did you do after school?
Badriah Hamelink:When I was 18, I went to live in Sri Lanka for a year. I’d never heard of that country and I thought, well, I should definitely go there because that would be an adventure. So, I went there. I started out as a volunteer of the Women’s Development Foundation. Halfway through the year, the tsunami wave hit the country.
Badriah Hamelink:I decided I was going to start an orphanage together with the Women’s Development Foundation. I made a project proposal and I got a lot of money to start this orphanage with. But then somehow the organization that I was working for got corrupted and that ended badly. So I decided to leave them. And then I was doing martial arts for half a year and also started a cultural center and a musical center together with a friend from The States who came over to help after the tsunami.
Badriah Hamelink:It was a music center for children of four different religions and they would all make music together. So that was my adventure with being an activist youngster. And it really made me realise the power of culture and what it means if you don’t have culture to fall back on. It was very hard for them to pick up their lives or to envision something in the future because they didn’t have anything to measure their reality to. They didn’t have anything that would inspire them to aspire to something bigger than what they had seen so far.
Sarah Monk:What sort of thing are you thinking of?
Badriah Hamelink:If you are in a situation where you lose everything, you need courage to build it up again and you need to have some sort of vision. And if you don’t, then you’ll just sit around and wait for somebody to give you money or something else to happen. It really made me see the importance of civilisation.
Sarah Monk:After Sri Lanka, what happened next?
Badriah Hamelink:I went back to Holland and I wanted to go to art school, but my family told me I should go to university because I’d done the lyseum and at least I would be able to make some money. So I listened to them. It wasn’t the right decision. I found out quite soon. But first I studied literature at the University of Amsterdam.
Badriah Hamelink:I was going to go for philosophy. My father convinced me to go for literature. That way I could always be a teacher. Both of those totally not my thing, neither literature nor teaching. But I tried and after half a year I’d already traded university for art school.
Badriah Hamelink:Also in Amsterdam. Also in Amsterdam, the Gerhard Rietveld Academy, a course that was called Word and Build, something like Word and Image. It was a course which involved creative writing and art. But soon enough, I was gravitating much more towards the art than towards writing. Yeah, I started to work with actual materials.
Badriah Hamelink:At some point I made something out of clay and I really liked it. And then I remembered stone, so I went back to that. At first the teachers were very enthusiastic, but because it was the first year and it was quite a conceptual art school, they were like, okay, so now we know that you can do that, now you should go and try something else. I went like, no, I don’t want to try something else, I want to do this. It was not so easy to learn any techniques in this art school.
Badriah Hamelink:For example, I would go to the metal department and I would ask them, Can you teach me how to weld? And they said, No, we have rules and regulations for fire control and so on. So, you just tell us where to weld it and we’ll do it for you. That was hugely disappointing to me because I wanted to do it myself. I was frustrated and I was talking to a friend of mine, Emmanuel Klein, also a sculptor and artist.
Badriah Hamelink:He said, you know where you should go? You should go to Pietrasanta.
Sarah Monk:How long ago was that?
Badriah Hamelink:That was in 02/2007. And then I was 20 years old. I had no plan really. I just hitchhiked here with only my backpack. The only thing I knew was that I liked the work of Armen Agop because Emmanuel showed me pictures of all kinds of artists who worked here.
Badriah Hamelink:He showed me Helaine Blumenfeld and he showed me Armen Agop and some others. And I really liked his work. There was something in it that really attracted me.
Sarah Monk:What do you think that was?
Badriah Hamelink:Hard to put it into words. I would say it’s very centred, very self contained in a way. I really like that. And of course I also very much like the aesthetics, very simple and very incorruptible. So I came here and I remember that I didn’t have a place to stay.
Badriah Hamelink:So I went up to La Rocha and I climbed over a wall and I slept there. I was with a friend. I wasn’t alone. I was with a friend at that point.
Badriah Hamelink:And there was there was a bunch of old catalogues lying around. And in them was the address of Armen’s studio. So, I went there and I asked, is Armen a copier? I had no idea what he looked like. And they were like, yeah, he’s up there in the back.
Badriah Hamelink:I went over and I said, hi, I’m SusannaB. At that point, I was calling myself Susanna. And I really like your work and I want to learn something from you. And he went, Okay, well, we return tomorrow. So I came back the next day and he had arranged Yunya Tanaka, a Japanese sculptor, to lend me his work to work on a little bit.
Badriah Hamelink:It was a huge black granite column and it had cuts in it. And I only had to remove the excess material. But to me that was very scary because I’d never worked with granite before and it was the work of somebody else. So, in the beginning I started out very carefully, but then after a while I got the hang of it and I was hammering away and then I completely lost track of everything. And then somebody tapped on my shoulder and it was Martin Foote.
Badriah Hamelink:Oh, yes. Our man had asked Martin if I could work in the studio for two months. And this was Studio Trivierti. So I did and stayed for a year. Wow.
Badriah Hamelink:With some periods in between where I was working in other places.
Sarah Monk:Would you say that you were apprenticing with someone, helping with their work, or were you already developing your own?
Badriah Hamelink:I was developing my own. I wasn’t actually apprenticing in that sense. But since I was a young artist, everybody was very helpful. I learned a lot. I had to learn Italian first.
Badriah Hamelink:But then when I had learned Italian, there were so many Artigiani who would just come by once every so often and take a look and tell you that you were doing that all wrong and you should do it like this and like this. And I had a great time.
Sarah Monk:So you did a year at what is now called La Povereira. Is that right?
Badriah Hamelink:Yes. I lived at that Zana in the winter, so I was gone for about four or five months.
Sarah Monk:Okay. So your experience of Pietrasanta in 02/2007 was positive. It was a very inclusive place. How did you feel discovering a place like this?
Badriah Hamelink:It has two sides. It’s very inclusive, but it’s also a small village. I feel that the Italians are very open and extroverted and always out on the piazza and it’s very lively. And I totally fell in love with that. But there’s also the other side where it’s absolutely family culture and you’re either within family or you’re not.
Badriah Hamelink:So that’s also there. And spending the winter in Zauno was pretty lonely for a youngster.
Sarah Monk:Why did you grow up there?
Badriah Hamelink:Well, I was very short on money in that period because I had to somehow finance this year. I had some help from my mom, but I was living on, I think, 300 a month, of which 200 were rent. So that was €100 And in Edzena I could live with very little money and spend the winter and still have a studio because there I would rent my house and studio for the same amount.
Sarah Monk:But it was cold.
Badriah Hamelink:It was very cold.
Badriah Hamelink:But the food was good.
Badriah Hamelink:Well I had to cook myself so food was I was 20, I didn’t really know how to cook back then.
Sarah Monk:Students tend to live off pasta anyways.
Badriah Hamelink:Exactly.
Sarah Monk:We’re talking in 2020 and I’m wondering how the COVID pandemic experience may have affected your outlook, your work, your future plans.
Badriah Hamelink:It hasn’t really caused me to change anything fundamentally. Maybe I hang out with people a little less, but I was already somebody who was more or less working by themselves. The only thing that I think has changed is that the focus will be a little bit more on the digital because it’s easier to reach your public.
Sarah Monk:Has the new technology changed the way you’ve worked over the last period?
Badriah Hamelink:I do use the computer for editing images and I use those as sketch sketches.
Badriah Hamelink:I am also working on something and I’m not really sure what I think about it yet, but it involves three d scanning. So that is the most technological thing that I’ve done so far.
Sarah Monk:So what are you working on now in Pietrasanta? We’re in August 2020. What are you working on this week?
Badriah Hamelink:I’m working on a work that involves reflection in two axes horizontally and vertically. It’s slightly architectural and it’s very symmetric. There is a new theme where symmetry reflection have become quite important. That started out a year ago. I had an accident where I fell from 4.5 metres and hit my head quite badly.
Badriah Hamelink:So, I had some brain damage, or at least a very heavy concussion. And I couldn’t work a lot. I was in rehabilitation for about a year. I was sitting in this rehabilitation center and I was sitting looking at my phone. I started reworking photos of work that I had made or of stones that I had taken.
Badriah Hamelink:I was just playing around and I started mirroring some images. Mirroring became an act in itself. And of course, as a result, symmetry became very important. Before, I had always purposely gone away from symmetry. I thought it was boring. Symmetry was boring.
Badriah Hamelink:I always tried to create something that was slightly asymmetrical. But now I found that symmetry has a certain power, this absoluteness. If you look at, for example, architecture, you can see law buildings or something like that. They are old temples of the Greek.
Badriah Hamelink:They are magical and they express a certain balance, equanimity. And that’s what interests me about it. And the reflection, of course, is also metaphorical in a way.
Sarah Monk:That must have been quite a shock to the system.
Badriah Hamelink:Absolutely. Not only to the system, especially to the mind, I think. The shock was that I was mortal. I never really realised that I was mortal. Was still thinking that I was immortal.
Badriah Hamelink:Nothing had really occurred to make me realise that. And it gives a quite different perspective to life.
Sarah Monk:What was the biggest change, do you think, out of that incident?
Badriah Hamelink:Biggest change would be that I see myself and my life in a different light. The first thing that really came to mind after this had happened was, ‘Wow, I’m still here. I can be here.’ With that comes a certain determination, I think.
Sarah Monk:How long ago was that?
Badriah Hamelink:This was the 03/03/2019.
Badriah Hamelink:I had to take a lot of rest. I had to really learn to switch gears. It wasn’t so easy for me because usually when I’m in the flow of creating something and it would just go on. There was no need to stop before and now I can’t do that anymore. So sometimes I feel like I’ve aged a lot.
Badriah Hamelink:I have to really plan everything, be very careful about everything. Otherwise I get these tremendous headaches. So nothing is for granted anymore. You can’t just assume that it will be fine and we’ll have to plan and make sure that it will be fine.
Sarah Monk:And I guess the upside, if you can call it that, might be the focus and the determination that you mentioned earlier. What excites you now? What has sort of come to the top of your priority list now?
Badriah Hamelink:It’s definitely art. Of course, it was already on the top of my priority list, but I had gotten a child and that took a lot of energy and time as well. But it felt like I got a second chance at life. So I asked myself what was the thing that you were most passionate about? What did you really want to do with your life?
Badriah Hamelink:And it was art, so I feel like I’m back on track actually.
Sarah Monk:Great!
Sarah Monk:So thanks to Badriah Hamelink. You can see her work on her Instagram, @BadriaHamelink. Or her website bedriahamelink.com. As with all episodes, can find photographs of the work discussed on our website, materiallyspeaking.com or on Instagram. If you’re enjoying Materially Speaking, subscribe to our newsletter on our website We can let you know when our next episode goes live.
Sarah Monk:And if you feel moved to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform, we’ll be delighted, as that will help people find us. In our next episode, I’m meeting Guus Jooss, who divides his time between The Netherlands and Italy.
Guus Jooss:In my own work, I’m looking for pureness, honesty or clearness. And that you feel everything fits, everything falls in its place. And I always said to my students, feel like if you remember how you could play as child. Know, and children are playing in a very serious way. It’s about life and death.
Sarah Monk:Listen out for Guus Jooss, Serious Play.