Elisabeth Tonnard (1973) is a Dutch artist and poet working in artists' books, photography and literature.
Biography
Tonnard was born in
Leerdam
Leerdam () is a city and former municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of Utrecht.
The municipality was merged with the municipalities of Vianen and Zederik on 1 January 2019. The name of the new municipality is Vijfheerenland ...
and has a master's degree in literature from
Radboud University Nijmegen
Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, nl, Radboud Universiteit , formerly ''Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen'') is a public research university located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The university bears the name of Saint Radboud, a 9th century ...
(where she also taught), and an MFA in Visual Studies from
Visual Studies Workshop
Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a non-profit group dedicated to art education based in Rochester, New York, in the Neighborhood of the Arts. VSW supports makers and interpreters of images through education, publications, exhibitions, and collect ...
in
Rochester, New York
Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located i ...
.
She has published over forty books; these have been exhibited widely and are held in numerous private and public collections. Much of her work involves responding to existing books, texts and images, reworking them into new poetry, and creating photographic visual narratives. The works range in scale and method from a book that is completely invisible, to a book containing a short story that swallowed a novel, to a book that is a swimming pool. The work has won several awards, including the Kleine Hans award 2013. According to the report of the jury (Hans Samsom, Hans Eijkelboom, Hans Wolf, and
Hans Aarsman), she is a "poet in the space between photographs."
Tonnard's book ''In this Dark Wood'' pairs ninety photographs from the Fox Movie Flash collection (held at the Visual Studies Workshop) of people walking at night with English translations of the opening stanza of Dante's ''
Inferno'':
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.[In the translation by ]Allen Mandelbaum
__NOTOC__
Allen Mandelbaum (May 4, 1926 – October 27, 2011) was a Jewish American professor of literature and the humanities, poet, and translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian. His translations of classic works gained him numerous awar ...
: "When I had journeyed half of our life's way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray."
In winter 2014–2015,
Van Abbe Museum in
Eindhoven
Eindhoven () is a city and municipality in the Netherlands, located in the southern province of North Brabant of which it is its largest. With a population of 238,326 on 1 January 2022,[Groningen
Groningen (; gos, Grunn or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen province in the Netherlands. The ''capital of the north'', Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of the northern part of t ...]
exhibited ''The Library''.
[Sarah Bodman,]
Artists' Books #4: The Library by Elisabeth Tonnard
, a-n, 7 January 2016. Accessed 28 October 2018.
Notes
References
External links
Tonnard's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tonnard, Elisabeth
1973 births
Living people
Dutch women artists
Dutch women poets
People from Leerdam
21st-century Dutch women