* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Scarlett Hooft Graafland (1973) lives in Amsterdam and works just about everywhere in the world. Between 2005 and 2008 she traveled to Iceland, China, Bolivia and the Arctic Circle, more precisely to Igloolik. These journeys all required careful preparation and were spent in close company of the local population, often over a period of several months. Each project attests to Scarlett’s particularly strong commitment to her artistic endeavor.
Scarlett was initially educated as a sculptor, and her photographic work has the attributes of an installation as well as a performance. In the lava fields of Iceland, the mountains of China or the deserts of Bolivia, she is the choreographer of extraordinary ballets: nude figures on a colorful rooftop, women sitting on a mound of salt, or young girls astride a pagoda. Elsewhere, in the majesty of a foggy landscape, she lays out the perfect circle of a pizza pie on top of a lotus: a most contemporary offering to the eternal mountains of Yangzhou. Scarlett’s images, poetic and surrealist, playfully displace ordinary objects in strange lands.
Scarlett studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague, at the Bazalel Academy in Jerusalem and at the Parsons School of Design in New York.
