Madelon Hooykaas

Else Madelon Hooykaas (born 28 September 1942, in Maartensdijk) is a Dutch video artist, photographer and film maker.

She makes films, sculptures, audio-video installations and has published several books.

Madelon Hooykaas grew up in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Before leaving for Paris in 1964, she studied under various Dutch photographers.

In 1966 she was awarded the Europhot Prize for young photographers, as the Netherlands representative, and she then left for England to work on the photo project Along the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury, inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

She remained in England as visiting student at the Ealing School of Art & Design in London.

Professionally what interested her was to make films and photography as vehicles for conceptual art and she made particular use of sequential photography.

In Brussels she worked in a film laboratory and in Paris she was an assistant film production assistant before establishing herself as freelance photographer and film maker.

In 1968 she was awarded a travel scholarship by the Netherlands Ministry of the Arts to spend a year in the United States.

In New York she worked as assistant to the photographers Philip Halsman and Bert Stern and had lessons from Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz.

In California a meeting with Alan Watts formed the start of her lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.

Back in the Netherlands, she moved to Amsterdam and started writing articles for the journal Foto, interviewing figures such as Robert Doisneau and Jacques Henri Lartigue.

For a short while she worked as a portrait and fashion photographer, experimenting meanwhile with Polaroid photos in combination with texts; she also made silk screen prints in this period.

In 1970 she left for Japan to interview a number of photographers and with the aim of experiencing life in a Zen cloister.

She was the first European woman to get permission to stay in a traditional monastery to take photographs.

In 1971 her photo book Zazen, was published, for which she and the Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek compiled the texts.

The publication of this book greatly enhanced her reputation and English and German editions followed.

Five years later another book appeared, Death Shadow, for which Hooykaas made the photos and Schierbeek wrote the poem.

In 1972 Hooykaas held solo exhibitions of her Polaroid experiments in Il Diaframma in Milan, and The Photographer’s Gallery in London.

Her work plays with space and time.

Photo works by Hooykaas form part of the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou/Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) and the University of Leiden.

In 1972 Hooykaas started an intensive collaboration in the field of film with the British photographer and filmmaker Elsa Stansfield in London and Amsterdam.

Their first movie, ‘Een van die dagen’ (One of Those Days) was broadcast by Dutch public TV in 1973.

It was also shown at festivals in London, Toronto and New York.

After that followed ‘Overbruggen’ (About Bridges) (1975), which was shown in several festivals including Cork, Rotterdam, and Grenoble.

Under the name Stansfield/Hooykaas they made their first video installations from 1975 onwards including ‘What’s It to You?’ (1975), Journeys (1976), Just Like That (1977) and ‘Split Seconds’ (1979).

Their work deals with the relation between nature and spirituality and explores scientific principles and natural forces such as radio waves and magnetic fields.

Hooykaas and Stansfield make use of contemporary technology such as film, audio and video in combination with organic materials such as sand, glass and copper.

In their work they show that everything that exists is animated by movement and change.

Work by Stansfield/Hooykaas is included in various international museum collections, and in the Netherlands it was awarded the Judith Leyster Prize in 1996.

The installations and films of Hooykaas/Stansfield have been exhibited in many venues, for instance in Montreal, Sydney (Biennale), Chicago, Madrid, Reykjavik, Kassel (Documenta), Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Bremen, Hanover, Berlin, Washington D.C., Lucerne, London (Whitechapel Gallery), Toronto, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Tokyo, Stockholm, Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Dundee and Hafnarfjordur.

At the Film Festival in Split, Croatia in 1999 they were awarded the Grand Prix for New Media for Person to Person (CD-ROM).

The interactive website Wishing Tree was realized in 2002 for the Center for Art and Technology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in collaboration with Rodrigo Cadiz and Brian Sarfatty.

In 2004 Elsa Stansfield died unexpectedly.

In the years that followed Hooykaas produced various video installations and audio works, both under the name Stansfield/Hooykaas and her own name, including Daydreaming and Haiku, the Art of the Present Moment, inspired by the poetry of Matsuo Bashō.

In 2009 Hooykaas again travelled to Japan to stay in a Zen monastery.

In 2010 she made two films about this second visit – Zazen nu/Zazen now and Het Pad/The Path – and she published the photo book Zazen nu [Zazen now] with an essay by Nico Tydeman.

In 2010 the book Revealing the Invisible – The Art of Stansfield/Hooykaas from Different Perspectives also appeared.

This standard work about the oeuvre of Hooykaas and Stansfield contains international contributions by David F. Peat, Malcolm Dickson, Dorothea Franck, Nicole Gingras, Heiner Holtappels, Janneke Wesseling, Kitty Zijlmans and others.

For De Ketelfactory project space in Schiedam and for C.C.A. in Glasgow (Scotland) Madelon Hooykaas made the video installation and drawing Mount Analogue (2010), inspired by René Daumal's book Le Mont Analogue, on which Dorothea Franck wrote the essay Kunst en aandacht – Het beklimmen van Mount Analogue [Art and Mindfulness – Climbing Mount Analogue].