Roosje van Donselaar (1986, Haarlem) makes sculptural work that emerges from material investigation and historical research working in tandem, driven by fascination with how humans create meaning across time and cultures.

 

She works intuitively with materials, currently clay and gold, allowing them to reveal their possibilities through making. Parallel to this tactile process, van Donselaar digs into stories: myths, legends, rituals, forgotten practices, what different cultures elevated or dismissed. The research fuels the work, but the work refuses singular interpretation, it plays with meaning rather than fixing it.

 

Clay as earth, residue of all that has lived. Gold formed only through dying stars. The combination insists on connection across a small planet where we inflate our differences despite shared cosmic origin. Van Donselaar celebrates this: the strange wonder of existence, the inventiveness of human storytelling, the beauty of what ancestors created to understand their world. 

Her practice celebrates the accumulated beauty and strangeness of how we all got here.