Artist Statement
Ritual-based artistic research forms the foundation of Barbara Michelle Edelman’s autonomous practice as an artist. Working across photography, installation and performative forms, she investigates how ritual structures can become visible and felt, and how they can open space for reflection and transformation. Her work explores intergenerational memory and transmission, motherhood, grief and female embodiment.
Moving between staged, documentary and performative modes, she engages photography as both image and act: a medium through which lived experience can become visible, relational and collectively felt. She uses photography to register gestures, presence and ritual structures, making these layers tangible through image.
Rooted in the body as a site of memory, transition and symbolic meaning, her work unfolds through elemental materials, gesture and spatial intervention. She approaches photography as an expanded field, where image-making intersects with ritual structure, presence and collective resonance. In doing so, her practice engages broader questions around care, female experience, transmission and the ways personal histories are carried within social and cultural frameworks.
BIOGRAPHY
Her work has been nominated for New Dutch Photography Talent (GUP Magazine, 2018) and Generation ’17 by MOAM. She also received recognition in the International Fine Art Photography Awards and an Honorable Mention in the category “Women Seen by Women” at the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards (2024).
She studied autonomous photography at the Photo Academy Amsterdam and later participated in the Marina Abramović Institute’s performance program Cleaning the House. She is currently completing a post-academic university one-year program in Applied Ritual Design at the University of Humanistic Studies.
CONTACT
The Netherlands
b.m.edelman@gmail.com
+31624600290