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Gwen Stok

Gwen Stok - illustratie: Gwen Stok
Gwen Stok - illustratie: Gwen Stok

(Netherlands, 1983) studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy and creates illustrations and comics that provide insight into human nature with philosophical playfulness. She has been published in various magazines and turned Toon Tellegen's animal stories Een Verre Reis (A Long Journey, 2017) into an app of the same title and De Genezing van de Krekel (The Healing of the Cricket, 2019) into a graphic novel. The app won two Lovie Awards, a Gold Guppy and a Special Mention at the Bologna Ragazzi Digital Award. During the pandemic, the City Archive and Centre for Visual Arts of Rotterdam named her "special city artist" for her depiction of developments during the winter lockdown: the repetitiveness, isolation and powerlessness, but also the increasing amount of postal workers bearing mounds of packages, and bike couriers. In Memoir of a Jellyfish (2021), Stok investigates what happens when gravity disappears and the path of existence is no longer linear. The result is a picture story in the form of A5-sized cards with an augmented-reality layer. Together with Bruno Ferro Xavier da Silva she also creates ink and wall drawings under the name Trompette de la Mort.

(WN 2022)

Archive available for: Gwen Stok

  • Winternachten 2022 – Thursday Night Unlimited

    Meat:Woman

    Women, meat and women's flesh - with Agustina Bazterrica, Roanne van Voorst, Elianne van Elderen and Gwen Stok

    What is the connection between women's bodies and flesh? Both are widely objectified - in advertising, film and language use. Is there also, then, a possible link between the consumption of meat and the objectification of the female body? Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica and Dutch anthropologiest and writer Roanne van Voorst have both written highly intriguing books about this connection. During Meat:Woman they discussed this with each other.

    Agustina Bazterrica makes the connection between woman and meat in her novel Tender is the Flesh. In a dystopian Argentina, cannibalism is legal and people eat their fellows - those that are least visible, anyway. Roanne van Vorst wrote Ooit aten we dieren (Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals), an investigation into the future of food that's a must-read for vegetarians, vegans and meat-eaters; in Van Voorst's future, we no longer eat any meat at all. Two totally different narratives, yet we'll discover whether the authors are perhaps driven by the same impulse.

    Commissioned by Winternachten Festival, new talent Elianne van Elderen got inspired by the work of illustrator Gwen Stok, who made three extra drawings with reference to Bazterrica's work.
    Want to get in the mood? Listen to the podcast Short guide to: Meat, in which programmer Joëlle Koorneef talks to Ruth Ozeki, the Japanese-American author who has written about meat like no other. My Year of Meats is a humorous yet highly critical novel about the meat industry, among other subjets, which made a huge impact in 2000.

    English spoken.