Solo Exhibition at Bohusläns Museum in Sweden

In the borderland between drawing and movement, a world opens where nature is never still.

Simone Hooymans creates animated installations rooted in hand-drawn watercolours and pencil drawings. Through slow, circular movements, the images transform into living landscapes — rooms to enter, leave and return to.

Her work moves intuitively and associatively rather than narratively. What she portrays are not stories but moods and states: nature as fantasy, mysticism and constant transformation. For Hooymans, animation is a way of entering the image — allowing the hand-drawn to expand into an environment that a camera could never capture.

In several of the works, the beauty of nature carries an undercurrent of the apocalyptic. Collapse appears not merely as destruction but as transformation — a moment when the world dissolves and new forms emerge. The microscopic and the cosmic meet: invisible life forms are given a sacred presence, and the precision of the drawn line opens toward the universe and myth.

Sound is a fundamental element of the installations. In close collaboration with composers, individual soundscapes are developed that interact with the images and turn nature’s elements into living actors rather than still objects. Together, image and sound form a kind of polyphonic environment where perception slowly shifts.

Konsthallen becomes here a place to linger — a room where what cannot otherwise be seen slowly comes into view.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Simone Hooymans (1974) was born in the Netherlands and lives and works in Norway. A graduate of art academies in Arnhem and Breda, she has shown her work at major international exhibitions and film festivals worldwide, as well as at the prestigious Norwegian exhibitions Statens Høstutstilling and Vestlandsutstillingen.

Curator Bohusläns Museum, Anna van der Vliet