Tine Colen

six-week residency of What We Will at wpZimmer – Workspace Performing Arts, Antwerp The residency unfolded through collective drawing, reading aloud The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han while cleaning wool; repairing previously made carpets; washing, mordanting, dyeing, and carding sheep’s wool; preparing an indigo dye vat; collecting galls from Turkish oak; festively felting a […]

Shoes (2019) made of marbled cedarwood with inlaid found semi-precious stones next to a pedestal (2025) of collected materials: stone, feathers, beads, drinking straw, shells, friendship bracelet, earring, bottle cap, ribbon, string, plastic, nettle, daisies, cattail, textile, paper, …

This series is a continuation of the Whisks and Gifts, created from trees after Christmas. Some of these objects were exhibited in a window residency throughout January at Wilder Antwerp.  

sourdough bread lined with blue cornmeal and a pink border of fresh strawberry jam, a serrated knife made from diseased boxwood and a honey spoon crafted from a discarded Christmas tree, served on a reglazed plate made from shards. On the occasion of Antwerp Art Weekend in The Oracle Gallery.

When I walked along the roadsides searching for dye plants, it was mainly nettles that I encountered in large quantities. Nettles and blackberries are much more prevalent than they used to be due to increased nitrogen levels in the soil. From the outer fibers, I made a ‘nettle cloth’ to use as a sieve for the dye baths, and it became my readily available work material throughout the summer months.

WWW is a collective of artists who use public space for learning through interaction and production. Its current focus is on the process of felting and the possibilities for felted rugs to serve as a platform to generate activities, stories or ideas.

In the village square of Mol-Rauw, a mat was felted. Shaped like a pair of trousers with double legs, it accommodates two people in a work by Jaimy Van Der Sloten, organiser of ‘De Biënnale van Mol-Rauw’. It has since found a new purpose as a play mat for his newborn twins.

For the first group exhibition at Huiskamer, Lot Doms and Bram Van Houtte brought together in their house a rhapsody of chairs and tables formed by different artists and designers. Tine Colen participated with a marbled and veneered table, executed and designed in collaboration with Jan Van Goethem and Joke De Becker for a scenography […]

It was an old custom to saw off the top of the pine tree that had been decorated in the house after Christmas. Trimmed, it turned into a whisk for stirring porridge that year. I read about it in a book of Christmas stories while reading to my two daughters before bedtime. We hadn’t brought a Christmas tree into the house, but in the middle of January, the sidewalks were full, so we took evening walks with a bag and a saw. The tree tops were trimmed – and later also shaped by steaming, peeling bark, bending, and drilling – into whisks of all kinds of variations that we gave to people around us.

Sofia (Bulgaria) Jan Van Goethem, Nele Tas and Tine Colen previously worked together under the name 3 24 51 76. In a ground-floor studio in Antwerp, they invited other artists into an ever-changing and exponentially growing presentation on the verge of an exhibition, a performance and a happening at once. This vivid practice of visualizing […]

‘Grafbloemen’ invited friends to use their apartment as an exhibition space under the guise of an open house. Tine Colen participated with a felted carpet that resulted from a period of weekly cooperation with Marianne Borremans and Sigurrós G. Bjornsdottir. This partnership eventually grew into the What We Will Collective.

In March 2022, the ground-floor apartment at Krugerplein 13 in Borgerhout (Antwerp) was vacant between tenants. Nele Tas, Tine Colen, and Jan Van Goethem invited people to showcase objects or contribute in other ways over the course of four consecutive weeks. The result was an ever-changing and exponentially growing presentation that defied any form of categorization.

The CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm where I harvest vegetables weekly uses rye as a green manure on beds that will be replanted the following year. While exploring how this shared piece of land could provide me with materials for my work, I harvested some rye stalks. In folk art, I discovered the use of […]

During the exhibition ‘Supply and demand’ at The Mothership (Antwerp), Tine Colen presented an installation that consists of three self-made, artisanal objects: a nettle cloth, a broom and a woolen blanket dyed with diverse substances. She made these objects using materials from her direct environment, things that were sometimes produced for very different goals. The […]

Exhibition at Galerie d’Apostrof (Deinze)with work by Bruno Van Dijck, Marc Van Roy, Tine Colen en Jan Van Goethem. Tine Colen showcased a nettle cloth and a net made from hand-twisted nettle fibers, as well as wooden utensils and sculptures made from discarded Christmas trees and tables created in collaboration with Jan Van Goethem. On […]

I learned a recipe for salt-crusted salmon from my mother-in-law. For celebrations, a large piece of salmon would be bought and prepared whole. Once all the flavors had seeped in and the edible parts had been carefully sliced away with a filleting knife, a beautiful piece of skin remained. It seemed a shame to throw […]

We traveled to Romania in two stages, taking the night train. Vienna was our stopover. While passing by the display cases filled with stones at the Natural History Museum, we noticed how many of the handwritten labels pointed to Romania as the place of origin. A few days later, it felt as though an agate […]

It was an old custom to saw off the top of the pine tree that had been decorated in the house after Christmas. Trimmed, it turned into a whisk for stirring porridge that year. I read about it in a book of Christmas stories while reading to my two daughters before bedtime. We hadn’t brought […]

Katrien Oosterlinck designs social choreographies in the form of performances or installations. Jan Van Goethem and Tine Colen collaborated on the scenography for the projects Imagine Moving Rocks (2017) and Treffen (2019).   The project Standing still / Still standing, took place in the summer of 2019. They were invited by Katrien Oosterlinck to collaborate […]

I walked with my gaze lowered and discovered a palette of gray dove feathers and white swan feathers in the Rivierenhof, along with some vibrant colors in the zoo. I launch it like a kite shaped like an eye, longing to observe all of this from a greater distance.

The exhibition “De opwarming” is the culmination of a research project by five painting instructors at the Antwerp Academy (Bruno Van Dijck, Tina Gillen, Ellen De Meutter, Pat Harris, Tine Colen) and art critic Jeroen Laureyns. Over two years ago, they, along with several painting students, began reading Naomi Klein’s book No Time and explored […]

To test and compare colors when mixing, I had a habit of quickly creating a color patch at the edge of a sheet of scrap paper. I later used this simple strategy to paint landscapes outdoors. I systematically tried to record the colors I saw in front of me as accurately as possible, repeating the […]

In the participatory art project Vormfrakken, Kristof Van Gestel and Manoeuvre crafted textile objects in a wide range of shapes, colors, and textures. At Van Gestel’s request, Tine Colen, Jan Van Goethem and Joke De Becker designed the scenography for its presentation in the Rechts/Averechts exhibition at Design Museum Gent. Since then, the three distinct […]

Participation in Idiosyncratische Machine Zeventien Robots – Croxhapox Ghent Idiosyncratic Machine is a form-generating drawing method developed by Kristof Van Gestel. By focusing on the spaces between everyday objects, unexpected abstract shapes are systematically derived through a series of steps. On October 11, 2015, Tine Colen, Kitty Bons, Pieter Jennes and Wouter Straetmans visited the […]

Mannekeskast for K & V Lacquered and marbled plywood with laser-cut veneer inlay, featuring sculpted shoes and handles by Jan Van Goethem, Sophie Anson, Joke De Becker, and Tine Colen   Cabinet for R & J Laquered and marbled plywood with book sculpture by Jan Van Goethem and Tine Colen   Cabinet S & T […]

A passage from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima describes a young boy visiting the pavilion of the temple where his father trained as a priest. It had been described to him since childhood as The Most Beautiful. Upon first seeing it, he is greatly disappointed, but when he […]

Frederik Verlinden curated this group exhibition, in which I participated with a selection of paintings. One of these was later auctioned at Bernaerts during the event “A City is Not a Road” in support of Ringland.  

A found, well-used plank, nailed onto two supports, became our table, breadboard, bench, and serving tray In search of something equally simple and beautiful, we crafted our first plank in maple. We deliberately added irregularities to offset its newness. A planed board was halved and then rejoined with a 2-degree angle in two directions. Mistakes, […]

The unifying element of this exhibition is black ink made from oak galls and rust. In use since at least the 4th century, this ink has historically served as writing and drawing ink, as well as a dye for textiles, wood, teeth, and skin. Ada Van Hoorebeke sent her own version of iron gall ink […]

Lokaal 01, Antwerpen The starting point for Artists by Night was the text How to Be an Artist by Night by Raqs Media Collective: “When art students graduate from their academies, they usually end up as ‘no collar’ workers in the industry by day, and artists, by night, in their dreams.” The common thread that […]

The ‘Gaverprijs’ is a biennial competition for contemporary painting. After winning the 2012 edition, I had the opportunity to exhibit at CC De Schakel in Waregem. I invited Sophie Anson to showcase our work in dialogue with one another. We were, and still are, often each other’s first sounding board, which makes mutual influence not […]

In 2013, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp marked its 350th anniversary. The M HKA joined in the celebrations: in the context of Happy Birthday Dear Academy the museum welcomed the Academy to its top floors. At MUHKALUMNI, the ‘white cube’ concept was done away with and Yona Friedman’s work served as the backbone around which work […]

Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp Little Big Paintings It must have been a combination of holding the incomprehensible presence of my first child’s tiny body in my arms and observing, with some skepticism, the tendency to increase the scale of most master pieces, as if bigger meant better, that made me reflect on scale […]

I wanted to move too. The focus on stage immediately pulls you in, but I struggled to find my own purpose right away. I didn’t want to make model drawings like the ones we’ve been doing at the academy for the past three years. The act of drawing didn’t feel proportional to the intensity of […]

During my third year of a bachelor’s in painting, I dedicated several months to painting a daily flower still life in gouache. I didn’t yet know what specific image would capture it, but I hoped that this method would value slowness and smallness.