Excerpt from article written by Marsha Bruinen for De Volkskrant, freely translated

"...

Art made from everyday objects comes frighteningly close. This also applies to the monobloc mobiles that Bjarland has hung up in Omstand. You see your own body reflected in them: the floating sculptures suggest the shapes of skeletons. The bend in a former armrest looks like a hip, the plastic bars that once formed the backrest a rib cage.

When Bjarland saw the broken pieces of monobloc during her bike ride past containers, she indeed thought of skeletons. Brittle, weathered and dirty, the pieces of plastic almost looked like excavated bones. Yet there is life in the artwork Remains (2024). The sculptures hang in the air like puppets that could start moving at any moment.

If these sculptures represent death, then dancing death, as the 16th-century German artist Hans Holbein depicted it so beautifully. In his famous series of woodcuts entitled Dance of Death you see how death enters the lives of various figures such as a pope, a farmer, a judge and a noblewoman. Not gloomy but grinning, sometimes even beating the drum with pleasure. ‘No one can escape me!’... "

Read the whole article here (in Dutch).