PENTHESILEA

CROSSING THE TRESHOLD OF INTIMACY

Daphne van de Velde’s work explores the delicate tension between longing for intimacy and fearing physical confrontation. Her deeply autobiographical practice reflects on what it means to exist as a woman within a male-dominated society. Themes such as desire and threat recur throughout her work, with vulnerability forming a poignant dialogue between exposure and protection.

For the artist, creation is a means of shaping her narrative; she carefully opens a window onto a past of abuse, where unresolved issues lie dormant. Her work inhabits the uncertain space between closeness and separation, where every movement crosses a boundary. 

Drawing inspiration from the Amazonian queen Penthesilea in Greek mythology who embraces asceticism to avoid the wounds of love, Daphne van de Velde offers a universal and relatable perspective on this theme. She demonstrates how this conflict persists in the present day: despite emancipation, female sexuality is still chained, and longing lurks beneath the surface. Penthesilea is a courageous search for the moment of crossing: the charged point at which an invisible boundary is crossed and the inner world breaks through.

Van de Velde moves between photography, performance and sculpture to explore these border crossings. Her body, which is central to her creative process, functions as both the subject and the instrument; the vessel and the voice. She approaches each medium as a forensic landscape, zooming in and out to investigate how closely she can examine an image before it falls apart. Her sculptural installations are fragmentary, tactile and visceral, telling stories of transformation and resistance. They bear the traces of touch and the silence after a breakup.

With a background in contemporary dance and degrees in Fine Arts, in Architecture and in Autonomous Photography, Van de Velde’s work is firmly grounded in spatial awareness and physical movement. Her practice is one of slow surrender: of dismantled barriers, of boundaries being tested and an identity emerging.

In an era where closeness and physicality are becoming less self-evident, she invites viewers to transition from indifference to love, acknowledging that the body is both a boundary and a bridge.

 

John Devos, lecturer, critic, curator, September 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In ‘Penthesilea I’ multimedia  (2025) the crime scene is scanned almost microscopically for traces of the drift called love. The film is a visceral exploration of impossible love, where desire and fear collide in the fragile space between intimacy and destruction.

 

 

 

 

‘Penthesilea II’ multimedia (2025) is an existential search for what lies beneath the surface. Zooming in, zooming out, and exploring how close you can let someone come until the images collapse. The film is a meditation on loneliness, the hunger for touch, and the courage to risk heartbreak in order to connect.

 

 

 

(for full version, please contact info@daphnevandevelde.nl)