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Hilde Onis

Literair, keramiek, installatie, cross-over, beeldhouwen, Artistiek onderzoek

Mijn werk manifesteert zich in installaties die sculpturen, taal, gevonden objecten en ingrepen in de tentoonstellingsruimte samenbrengen. In mijn studio vloeien onderzoek, beeldhouwen en schrijven in elkaar over; deze werkwijze vormt de kern van mijn praktijk.

Ik onderzoek hoe we de materiële wereld om ons heen begrijpen en hoe controle en verlangen naar (valse) veiligheid zich in onze omgeving manifesteren. Een object benaderen met je lichaam vraagt om haptische kennis: om iets echt te begrijpen, moet je de grenzen aftasten—tot het moment dat het breekt, of jijzelf breekt. Hoe worden we gevormd door wat we hanteren? Contact, hoe minimaal ook, impliceert vaak erosie. De wisselwerking tussen object en lichaam, als bedreiger of bedreigde, fascineert me.
Mijn installaties balanceren tussen betekenissen en spelen met de onderlinge afhankelijkheid tussen ons en de materiële wereld.
De context van de tentoonstellingsruimte vormt vaak een startpunt voor mijn installaties. Door architectonische elementen te onderzoeken en ermee in dialoog te gaan, zoek ik naar manieren om bestaande ruimtes een nieuwe betekenislaag te geven.

Naast mijn beeldende werk schrijf ik poëzie, waarin de relatie tussen mens, omgeving en materie centraal staat. Ik gebruik taal als een middel om de werkelijkheid subtiel te verschuiven, om een potentie op te roepen die de tastbare wereld niet direct toelaat. Waar poëzie een vorm van controle vereist, zie ik daarin een verweer tegen de ervaring van verloren regie in de buitenwereld.

Shape Sorter (gasp) Metal, blown glass 30 x 30 x 30 cm
Shape Sorter (gasp) Metal, blown glass 30 x 30 x 30 cm (2025) - A body that handles an object simultaneously influences and transforms it. The same applies to reading and communication: the reader shapes a text through interpretation, and in turn, the text shapes the reader. A child learns to recognize shapes by holding, sorting, and fitting them into openings. People first explore language through physical acts, by forming sounds with their mouths. Reading and understanding are not purely intellectual processes, but are rooted in touch and bodily experience. The series ‘Shape Sorters’ reflects this sensibility. The abstract forms recall children's toys but also resemble punctuation marks — visual symbols of language structure. By choosing glassblowing as a technique, one of the most fundamental of bodily actions-- breath, is captured. This invisible, ephemeral force becomes visible in the fragile transparency of blown glass. The object is shaped by the body, ánd becomes a record of it. Just as a reader shapes a text through interpretation, and is in turn shaped by it.
Textual performance ‘Guardrail Heart’ at the opening of READING CHARACTERS exhibition at Billytown
Textual performance ‘Guardrail Heart’ at the opening of READING CHARACTERS exhibition at Billytown - May 9, 2025 Reading Characters is a project -consisting of both a publication and an exhibition- that examines language and reading, specifically focusing on typography. The project is co-organized by Eva van Bemmelen and Annabelle Binnerts and will take place at Billytown, The Hague. For Reading Characters, each participating artist has developed a new work for both the publication and the exhibition. They all departed from the central theme of typography: the form or the origin of language and letters and how people communicate with each other. From there, they all moved in different directions: from dancing interpunction to a magician’s hand, a mother tongue, a heart-shaped guardrail, and a book that has never been read. Collectively, this exhibition aims to achieve a playful interplay between word, context, and material, an examination of what a word or character can be, and by doing so, widening our understanding of narration and communication. Participating artists: Clara Amaral, Jelena Vanoverbeek, Annelies Kamen, Hilde Onis, Ode de Kort, Puck Kroon, Eva van Bemmelen and Annabelle Binnerts.
Anarchive
Sketch Proposal The Anarchive (2025) - Sketch Proposal Spatial Design ‘The Anarchive’ for Roodkapje Rotterdam (2025) Me and Jasmijn Muskens were selected as a duo to further develop a spatial design for Roodkapje’s new Rotterdam venue and their project The Anarchive. An archive decides what’s valuable enough to save, and how. It shapes how we remember, how we access memory, and who gets left out. It claims neutrality, but is deeply colonial and patriarchal. It leaves silences. To anarchive is to break from that. Roodkapje’s anarchive is subjective, polyvocal, and unevenly shaped. Our design explores the tension between three terms with the same Greek root: AnARCHy, ARCHeology, ARCHive. Where archives and archaeology preserve and legitimize, anarchy disrupts and resists. The Anarchive holds that conflict—unstable, fluid, always open to reinterpretation. We approached it as an active, material process. Like excavation, we unearth and reshape fragments to tell partial stories. We worked with metal, a material that lives in a constant in between state: flexible but rigid, durable yet always changing. It rusts, melts, reforms. Alongside wood and stone, we used broken, cast, repurposed scraps from industries. Visible break lines run through forms, graphic and structural cues to fragmentation. Platforms, like a reconfigurable reading table, invite gathering and reflection. There’s space for silence, too, for what’s missing or erased. Everything is supposed to be mobile, adaptable, ready to be rearranged. Wheels, ridges, magnets, modules; tools to keep the anarchive unfixed.
However Small The Contact
However Small The Contact - However Small The Contact Feiko Beckers and Hilde Onis May 24th - June 1st, KATE Art Space, 2025 A body that handles an object influences and transforms it. The same applies to communication; the reader shapes a text through interpretation, and in turn, the text shapes the reader. A child learns to recognize shapes by holding, sorting, and fitting them into openings. People first explore language through physical acts, by forming sounds with their mouths. Reading and understanding are not purely intellectual processes, but are rooted in touch and bodily experience. In the exhibition, you will encounter pillows under pressure, healed sandwiches, a support system to keep the roof from falling down, the breath of a glassblower caught in a metal mold, a crash barrier in the shape of a heart, musings about the proper use of wards and glass doorstoppers that will always be there to stop. However small the contact explores our intimacy with the objects we live with — and the point at which that intimacy begins to fracture.
Evacuation cord (2025) Casted Aluminum Various dimensions
Evacuation cord (2025) Casted Aluminum Various dimensions - "Evacuation Cord" explores the paradox of objects designed to reassure us in the face of danger. Normally, evacuation cords are made in bright, cheerful colors to guide children in a long chain safely out of a building during emergencies. Their playful appearance softens the severity of the situation, offering a sense of comfort in moments of fear, between the promise of safety and the reality of uncertainty. The work is crafted from recycled aluminum remnants sourced from the construction of a building. It aims to highlight the unsettling duality between the comforting design of safety devices and the harsh realities they are meant to address, urging us to consider how safety is both constructed and imagined.
‘Will hallways be here’
‘Will hallways be here’ - Installation Stained glass, natural stone, plastic, found objects, steel, text
Will hallways be there - glass doorstopper permanently sweating on the inside - glass doorstopper filled with protective foam peanuts - glass doorstopper impounding one year of dust from upper door ledge - glass doorstopper trapping a poem about having sex while grieving - glass doorstopper enclosing one human sip of water ?- glass doorstopper in the shape of a coffin - glass doorstopper waiting to be trapped in a crack - glass doorstopper holding thrust in pinched feet - glass doorstopper dreaming of crooks and nooks and pools of light - glass doorstopper holding an event that meant nothing to anyone - glass doorstopper silently eroding a monumental passage - glass doorstopper insisting on outstepping the boundary lines of property - glass doorstopper seizing the warm and hopeful space of pockets - glass doorstopper with edges so sharp they cut through your longing to enter - glass doorstopper wishing to dribble transparency all over - glass doorstopper completing a test of endurance - glass doorstopper made of cathedral glass thinking oh god - glass doorstopper on a ridge telling you: I will hallways be here to stop Edition of 23 stained glass doorstoppers (2023) Various sizes Stained glass, copper, tin, found materials.
Orchestrating Coincidence - Orchestrating Coincidence is a project by Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters, an edition of 30 unique sculptures existing of 26 individuals, 2 pairs and 5 artist proofs. With Orchestrating Coincidence, Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters take on the representation of the in-between,resulting in a series of 30 sculptures that defy odds by finding connection at their breaking point. By developing a method that aims to constrain but meanwhile evokes accident, the series’ individual objects have a say in controlling it’s own contours. Departing from these notions, they explore existing linear views of (gendered) positive and negative space in sculpture. The thirty unique sculptures are paired with an emphasizing publication that plays with character assignment. The printed leporello catalog integrally touches upon what it means to collect and be one of a whole. Next to the catalog, the series connects to an essay written synchronously to their production. Constructed through and around various artists and thinkers who take erosion, fragility, interspace and the ‘failure’ of objects in their original function as their point of departure, the text explores content emerging from parenthesis and absent material. To purchase the edition visit: www.orchestratingcoincidence.com (9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 29 & 30 sold) Every sculpture comes with corresponding packaging and a printed leporello catalog designed by graphic designer Janne Beldman. Separate catalog: €26 + shipping
Orchestrating Coincidence - Leporello Catalogue
Orchestrating Coincidence - Leporello Catalogue - With Orchestrating Coincidence, Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters take on the representation of the in-between,resulting in a series of 30 sculptures that defy odds by finding connection at their breaking point. By developing a method that aims to constrain but meanwhile evokes accident, the series’ individual objects have a say in controlling it’s own contours. Departing from these notions, they explore existing linear views of (gendered) positive and negative space in sculpture. The thirty unique sculptures are paired with an emphasizing publication that plays with character assignment. The printed leporello catalog integrally touches upon what it means to collect and be one of a whole.
Orchestrating Coincidence - documentation of the one-off site-specific exhibition
Orchestrating Coincidence - documentation of the one-off site-specific exhibition - Orchestrating Coincidence - documentation of the one-off site-specific exhibition at gallery Nieuw Charlois, Rotterdam (15.01 - 25.02.23) Orchestrating Coincidence is a project by Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters, an edition of 30 unique sculptures existing of 26 individuals, 2 pairs and 5 artist proofs. With Orchestrating Coincidence, Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters take on the representation of the in-between,resulting in a series of 30 sculptures that defy odds by finding connection at their breaking point. By developing a method that aims to constrain but meanwhile evokes accident the series’ individual objects have a say in controlling it’s own contours. Departing from these notions, they explore existing linear views of (gendered) positive and negative space in sculpture. The thirty unique sculptures are paired with an emphasizin publication that plays with character assignment. The printed leporello catalog integrally touches upon what it means to collect and be one of a whole. For more information about the project and to purchase an edition (11/30 sold), visit www.orchestratingcoincidence.com
Glass doorstopper holding thrust in pinched feet
Glass doorstopper holding thrust in pinched feet - glass doorstopper permanently sweating on the inside - glass doorstopper filled with protective foam peanuts - glass doorstopper impounding one year of dust from upper door ledge - glass doorstopper trapping a poem about having sex while grieving - glass doorstopper enclosing one human sip of water 
- glass doorstopper in the shape of a coffin - glass doorstopper waiting to be trapped in a crack - glass doorstopper holding thrust in pinched feet - glass doorstopper dreaming of crooks and nooks and pools of light - glass doorstopper holding an event that meant nothing to anyone - glass doorstopper silently eroding a monumental passage - glass doorstopper insisting on outstepping the boundary lines of property - glass doorstopper seizing the warm and hopeful space of pockets - glass doorstopper with edges so sharp they cut through your longing to enter - glass doorstopper wishing to dribble transparency all over - glass doorstopper completing a test of endurance - glass doorstopper made of cathedral glass thinking oh god - glass doorstopper on a ridge telling you: I will hallways be here to stop Installation at Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem. Edition of 23 stained glass doorstoppers Various sizes Stained glass, copper, tin, found materials.
Kattenbelletje
Kattenbelletje - Stained glass, paper noteblock part of installation ‘Will hallways be here’ at SpareWheel Brussel
70 meter long poem embroidered on black satin band
70 meter long poem embroidered on black satin band - Part of installation ‘Will hallways be here’
To Engulf - This tree was planted in rememberance of someone who lost someone who lost someone
To Engulf - This tree was planted in rememberance of someone who lost someone who lost someone - Alphabet of 26 ceramic sculptures engulfing trees, as part of Biotoop, a public art route opened in the city of Amstelveen in 2021. 26 ceramic objects hidden under the tree foliage have assigned letters from A to Z and act as a scavenger hunt within the main route. The sculptures are based on the phenomenon of edaphoecotropism, the ability of trees to engulf, grow around or break objects they encounter in their growth.The objects attribute small, sometimes magical, fictional events to the habitat of the trees and function as an informative pennant for remarkable incidents packaged as facts in the public space of neighborhoods Bovenkerk and Westwijk. As a result of its growth, the tree can ultimately choose to embrace or break with these applied characteristics. Graphics and visual identity by Joseph Hughes Curated by Ellis Kat Commissioned by Kunstmest Consulting Photos by Liza Wolters
The neighbors fence is not made of biscuits either (2020) - Site specific work made for the space of Marres Maastricht and the exhibition 'And me, Streams of You' Aluminium, PLA, Stucco, paint, bolts and joints 235 x 220 x 100 cm
LoO0?o????p & Venn Diagram Pot in installatie detail (2020) - Zoals getoond in KIOSK, Gent
Tastebud Potential (detail) 2019 - PLA, paper clay, epoxy clay, ginger powder, concrete, found object 70 x 45 x 17 cm
Installation overview - 2020 Concrete, steel, ceramics, styrofoam, acrylic one, lacquer paint, beeswax, wood, leather, found objects, plasticine clay. Various As shown during the graduation show of the MA Fine arts department at KASK, Gent, Belgium
Spherical octahedron with handles as legs (or: stopping / trying / understanding // To try to understand / To stop to understand / To stop trying /// To have to stop trying to understand and to move it, all of it, to your legs. Let them carry the weight.) - 2021 Ceramics (stoneware clay) 24 x 42 x 42 cm
Hawk Eye - 2020 Birdseed, fat, sunflower seeds, kurkuma, forest berries, clay, steel, concrete 250 x 52 x 12 cm A hawk’s eye symbolizes sharp-sightedness, alertness, an inescapable glance. The intense-colored sculpture, stands out guarding the landscape, acting as a talisman protecting the forest, while at the same time facilitating the adoption of a revised paradigm to the species and their socially conditioned nature. The sculpture researches the opportunity to challenge the fear instigated by a certain visual representation, inviting other bird species to literally peck at the eye of the hawk. The eye is continuously seen by another eye, a wildlife camera that films when it detects any warm-blooded being.
Installation overview - 2020 Concrete, steel, ceramics, styrofoam, acrylic one, lacquer paint, beeswax, wood, leather, found objects, plasticine clay. Various As shown during the graduation show of the MA Fine arts department at KASK, Gent, Belgium

READING CHARACTERS

Datum:
Locatie: Billytown
In samenwerking met: Stroom Den haag, Mondriaan Fonds, Jaap Harten Fonds, Wilco Art Books, Billytown

For Reading Characters, each participating artist has developed a new work for both a publication and an exhibition. They all departed from the central theme of typography: the form or the origin of language and letters and how people communicate with each other. From there, they all moved in different directions: from dancing interpunction to a magician’s hand, a mother tongue, a heart-shaped guardrail, and a book that has never been read.

https://billytown.org/gallery/reading-characters

Poetry readings, Writers Unlimited Festival, Den Haag, NL

Datum:
Locatie: Mauritshuis, Theater aan het Spui
In samenwerking met: Writers Unlimited Festival, Deburen

Schetsontwerp tentoonstellingsvloer nieuw gebouw TENT Rotterdam

Datum:
In samenwerking met: TENT Rotterdam

Schrijfresidentie DeBuren Parijs

Datum:
Locatie: Stichting Biermans Lapotre
In samenwerking met: DeBuren

Will hallways be here

Datum:
Locatie: SpareWheel
https://instagram.com/sparewheel_brussels

To Engulf

Datum:
Locatie: Publieke ruimte Amstelveen
In samenwerking met: Gemeente Amstelveen, Kunstmest Consulting

26 ceramic objects hidden under the tree foliage have assigned letters from A to Z and act as a scavenger hunt within the main route.
The sculptures are based on the phenomenon of edaphoecotropism, the ability of trees to engulf, grow around or break objects they encounter in their growth.The objects attribute small, sometimes magical, fictional events to the habitat of the trees and function as an informative pennant for remarkable incidents packaged as facts in the public space.

https://hildeonis.com/To-engulf-Biotoop-Amstelveen

Orchestrating Coincidence

Datum:
Locatie: Galerie Nieuw Charlois
In samenwerking met: Galerie Nieuw Charlois, Stichting Stokroos, Jaap Harten Fonds, Drukkerij Voetelink

With Orchestrating Coincidence, Hilde Onis and Liza Wolters take on the representation of the in-between,resulting in a series of 30 sculptures that defy odds by finding connection at their breaking point. By developing a method that aims to constrain but meanwhile evokes accident the series’ individual objects have a say in controlling it’s own contours.

Departing from these notions, they explore existing linear views of (gendered) positive and negative space in sculpture.

www.orchestratingcoincidence.com

‘And me, Streams of You’ (group exhibition) - Marres, Maastricht, NL

Datum:
Locatie: Marres
In samenwerking met: Marres, Z33

LICHEN, Group exhibition curated by Koi Persyn and Leo Lopez,

Datum:
Locatie: CLAPTRAP
In samenwerking met: in collaboration with Claptrap Antwerp as part of Brussels Gallery weekend

Waldeinsamkeit

Datum:
Locatie: Privédomein Wildenburg
In samenwerking met: KASK

LoO0ⓞｏ𝑜օₒp, Public sculpture at YART, Duivelsteen, Gent, BE

Datum:
Locatie: Duivelsteen Castle

Night Shift

Datum:
Locatie: Vooruit

Love@Secondsight

Datum:
Locatie: Corrosia

'Unknown afterglow affection collection' Solo Expositie

Datum:
Locatie: Kunstenlab

BOEKS, Stoppen met Lezen

Datum:
Locatie: Kunstenbibliotheek Gent

Duckkumenta

Datum:
Locatie: Studio Omstand

Red Pack Finals

Datum:
Locatie: Roodkapje

S01E02 exhibition + residence period at Het Resort, Groningen, NL

Datum:
Locatie: Noord Nederlands Theater

Prospects & Concepts, Art Rotterdam

Datum:
Locatie: Van Nelle Fabriek

LOOK AT US NOW

Datum:
Locatie: Beurs van Berlage
In samenwerking met: This art fair

'Trying to touch like 14 year olds in crash cars hit each other' Solo Expositie

Datum:
Locatie: Roodkapje

'I can't talk to you about my dreams when you're busy' - 5 hour solo performance, TENT Rotterdam, NL

Datum:
Locatie: TENT Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: CBK Rotterdam, TENT Rotterdam, Roodkapje Rotterdam
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