Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Jenny Ymker is not what you think. This Dutch artist, who weaves tapestries using an ancient technique combined with contemporary photography, has managed to create a unique universe that disorients as much as it captivates. If you have never seen her works, imagine monumental tapestries where the same woman, the artist herself, always appears alone, frozen in situations both banal and absurd. A woman sitting on a stump in the middle of a devastated forest, suitcase in hand. Another literally mopping the sea with a cloth and a bucket. Or the one who, in an empty and dull living room, searches for something in her handbag while balloons float on the ceiling.
Some critics would be content to see in this work a simple melancholic or nostalgic aesthetic. That is precisely where I differ. Because Jenny Ymker speaks to us of existential alienation, of the contemporary human condition, and does so with a biting irony that too few know how to detect. Her tapestries are mirrors that reflect back our own absurdity.
Ymker’s creative process is unique. She begins by staging photographs where she is both director and model. She carefully chooses accessories, clothing, locations. Then, she transforms these photos into woven tapestries, or “gobelins” as she calls them herself, evoking those woven works historically produced at the National Manufacture of Gobelins in Paris. An approach that associates the traditional medium of tapestry with the contemporaneity of staged self-portraiture.
In the history of Western art, tapestry has long been considered a minor art, relegated to the domestic sphere, to “feminine” craft. By taking over this medium, Ymker does more than rehabilitate a technique: she subverts the codes. She takes an art once intended to warm the cold walls of castles and to tell the exploits of the powerful, and transforms it into personal, intimate, offbeat narration.
Take her work “Vervlogen” (Bygone): a woman (Ymker) is sitting on a couch in a dimly lit room. Colorful balloons float on the ceiling. She is dressed modestly, absorbed in the contents of her handbag, while a cup and saucer lie, solitary, on the table. The title indicates that it is about “letting go.” But what is she letting go? The party that never happened? The guests who never came? Or is it a broader metaphor about the passage of time, about those moments that slip away from us?
Ymker’s strength lies in her ability to create iconic images, in the sense that they remain etched in our memory, but whose iconography remains open to interpretation. Art historian Ernst Gombrich would have loved this semiotic ambiguity [1]. In his writings on visual perception, Gombrich highlights how our interpretation of images is conditioned by our expectations and cultural background. Ymker’s tapestries play precisely on these expectations, divert them, create a perceptual disturbance that forces us to rethink our relationship to the image.
What particularly interests me in her work is the permanent tension between familiarity and strangeness. Julia Kristeva, in her analysis of “the uncanny” (a concept borrowed from Freud), reminds us that what is most disturbing is not radical otherness, but what is almost like us, almost familiar, but not quite [2]. Ymker’s scenes operate exactly in this register. They are recognizable, a woman in a living room or in a landscape, but their narrative logic escapes us.
The work “Mopping” perfectly illustrates this dimension. A woman wrings water from the sea with a piece of cloth and a bucket. A useless, endless, absurd action. Isn’t this a perfect metaphor for the contemporary human condition? We exhaust ourselves with endless tasks, the usefulness of which escapes us, in a world that seems increasingly senseless. Albert Camus would have seen Ymker as an artist of the absurd feeling par excellence.
There is something deeply cinematic about Ymker’s work, not in the sense of movement since her characters are frozen, but in the construction of the frame, in this temporal suspension that recalls certain fixed shots from the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni or Ingmar Bergman. Filmmakers who, like her, knew how to create images where human solitude unfolds in all its visual complexity.
Solitude, precisely, is omnipresent in her work. But not a romantic, heroic solitude. Rather, an ordinary, daily solitude, the one that inhabits us even surrounded by others. “I worked in the health field for a while,” Ymker explains. “If a person is no longer able to recount an event, no matter how small, that person will gradually lose her sense of meaning, of importance” [3]. This reflection on the importance of narrative, the ability to tell one’s story, permeates all her work.
In “The sky is deep,” a woman stands on a tree stump in the middle of a field of cut trunks, apparently traveling with a suitcase in hand. Where is she going? How does she move from one trunk to another? Absurd questions, of course, since the image freezes her in this suspended moment. It is precisely this indecisive, absurd moment, seeming to last eternally and presented so clearly, that gives the work its iconic or rather charismatic character. The iconography of the work is subject to different interpretations, but the image itself remains memorable.
The very fabric of the tapestry contributes to this aesthetic. The granular structure of the textile gives the images a particular quality, halfway between photographic precision and a certain graininess that evokes the early days of photography. This materiality strengthens the impression of images suspended outside of time, as if they emerged from a troubled collective memory.
Technically, the creation process is very interesting. Once the photograph is taken, Ymker transforms it into a weaving pattern. In collaboration with the weaver, she selects the appropriate colors of wool and cotton. Samples are woven first, allowing for adjustments, before the final tapestry is made. What I like about this process is the transformation of an instantaneous image (the photograph) into an object that requires weeks, even months of meticulous work. It is a deliberate slowing down, almost a form of resistance to the constant acceleration of our time.
In some of her tapestries, Ymker then embroiders certain parts of the image to highlight specific elements. In “Bevroren tranen” (Frozen Tears), inspired by Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise,” the pieces of ice are embroidered with silver threads. This attention to detail, this hybridization of techniques, adds an additional tactile dimension to the work.
Jenny Ymker is part of a lineage of female artists who use self-portraiture as a tool for identity and societal exploration. She herself cites Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman among her influences. Like Sherman, she uses her own body as a narrative vehicle, assuming different roles to better question our relationship with the world. But whereas Sherman plays with media and cinematic stereotypes, Ymker explores more intimate, more existential territories.
The work “Escape,” created for Muiden Castle as part of the exhibition “Army of Beauty, Women and Power since the Middle Ages,” perfectly illustrates this dimension. The piece takes falconry as a starting point, which for noblewomen in the Middle Ages was a way to elegantly escape embroidery or walking. In this work, a woman holds five falcons that fly off in all directions. Yet, she is not pulled from one side or the other by the birds but remains in her place. For Ymker, this image represents freedom and strength. There is a subtle subversion of gender-related expectations here. The woman controls these forces that could unbalance her. She stays grounded, sovereign. It is a powerful metaphor of female emancipation, without being didactic or explicit.
This underlying political dimension runs throughout Ymker’s work. Not a politics in the partisan sense, but a politics of gaze, of representation. She deliberately chooses clothes, bags, shoes from the past to reinforce the feeling of alienation from the environment. This choice is not accidental: it places her characters in an indeterminate temporality, neither quite contemporary nor quite historical. It is an in-between that destabilizes us, forcing us to detach from our usual benchmarks.
“The world of imagination can seem more real than reality itself,” asserts Ymker [3]. This phrase could serve as a manifesto for all her work. She does not seek to faithfully reproduce reality, but to create worlds that, by their very strangeness, speak more deeply to us about our condition than a mimetic representation would.
In “Hope,” a 2019 work, Ymker is inspired by a past practice: sending a balloon with a card bearing her name and address, hoping that someone far away will find it and send a letter. “It is the hope that someone sees you,” she explains. Isn’t that, deep down, what we all seek? To be seen, recognized, to exist in the gaze of the other?
This quest for recognition runs through the history of art since its origins. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyzed how the artistic field was structured around this search for legitimacy and recognition [4]. But Ymker shifts this question from the institutional field towards a more existential inquiry: how to authentically exist in a world where the vision of the other can both validate and alienate us?
Her work “Landscape in White,” created in 2020 for the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek cancer center, powerfully illustrates this existential dimension. The tapestry shows a winter landscape. “But after winter comes spring and summer,” comments Ymker. “The events of our life also know these seasons. The person in the work walks courageously and confidently on a solid rope. It is this confidence and courage that I want to show with this wall tapestry” [5]. In this particular hospital context, the work takes on an additional resonance, offering patients a visual metaphor of hope and resilience.
What I like about Ymker’s work is her ability to create images that haunt us long after we’ve seen them. Her “gobelins” are like strange dreams remembered upon waking, without fully grasping their meaning, but whose atmosphere persists. They evoke what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the real,” that dimension of experience that escapes symbolization and resists our attempt to put it into words [6].
Perhaps that’s why her works touch us so deeply. In a world saturated with explicit images that leave no room for ambiguity, Ymker creates visual spaces where mystery can still dwell. Her tapestries invite us not to passively consume images, but to actively engage in their interpretation, weaving our own stories from the threads she offers us.
Jenny Ymker is an artist of silence, suspension, and the in-between. Her characters inhabit transitional spaces, non-places, moments of waiting. They are like all of us: caught between a fading past and an uncertain future, seeking to make sense of our presence in the world. But, unlike many contemporary artists who approach these themes with cynicism or despair, Ymker maintains a form of dignity, even discreet hope.
Her work does not seek a spectacular aspect; it does not aim to dazzle us with technical effects or easy provocations. It operates in a subtler, more restrained mode. It is an art that demands time and attention, that does not immediately reveal all its secrets. In an artistic world often dominated by immediacy and visual one-upmanship, this restraint is almost subversive.
It is undoubtedly this quality that earned Ymker the prestigious Luxembourg Art Prize in 2019, a well-deserved international recognition for this artist who, from her studio in Tilburg, patiently weaves a unique visual universe at the crossroads of photography, tapestry, and performance. Because there is indeed a performative dimension in her work, even if it unfolds without an audience. Ymker stages herself, physically inhabiting the situations she creates. “For me, it is an essential part of the creation process, to create a certain world and to be part of it myself at that moment, to be in that situation for a while” [3]. This bodily experience, this physical living of the situations she represents, infuses her works with a particular authenticity.
The very choice of tapestry as the final medium is not accidental. Unlike photography, which captures a moment, tapestry unfolds over time, both in its creation and in its materiality. Ymker’s tapestries resist the planned obsolescence of contemporary digital images. They belong to a long temporality, almost anachronistic in our era of constant acceleration. This tension between contemporaneity and anachronism runs through her entire work. Her stagings are current, but her characters seem to come from another era. This temporal dissonance creates a distancing effect that allows us to see our present with a fresh, shifted perspective.
Jenny Ymker reminds us that art does not need to be loud to be impactful. That the most striking images are often the ones that whisper rather than scream. That beauty can be a vector of questioning as powerful as provocation. In a contemporary artistic landscape often dominated by noise and fury, her work is an eloquent island of silence.
So, the next time you encounter one of her tapestries, take the time to linger over it. Let yourself be inhabited by these images that are both strange and familiar. Reflect on what they awaken in you. Because, as Ymker herself said: “In my work, I depict situations with the intention of evoking stories in viewers. I always try not to be too literal, so that viewers have room to discover their own stories” [3].
Perhaps this is, ultimately, Ymker’s genius: to create works that are less finished objects and more invitations to an inner journey. Works that hold up a mirror in which we can project our own questions, our own wanderings. Works that, beneath their apparent simplicity, contain entire worlds to explore.
- Gombrich, Ernst. (1960). Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
- Kristeva, Julia. (1988). Strangers to Ourselves. Paris, Fayard.
- Artistic approach of Jenny Ymker, Luxembourg Art Prize, 2019.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. (1992). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Paris, Seuil.
- Website of the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Cancer Institute. Page on the exhibition “Jenny Ymker, Landscape in White” (visited in May 2025).
- Lacan, Jacques. (1973). The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Paris, Seuil.
