Longing’s Embrace

I often think about my childhood bunny. He used to sit very still, making us wonder whether he was happy. We would always end up agreeing: “he must be, his cage is quite large”. I think about how he escaped three times, eating all the dandelions in our garden. We always managed to catch him again. When he died I could feel his ribs through his thin-layered fur.

Sometimes we seem to have nothing to complain about but still yearn for more.

This subtlety and ambiguity of unfulfilled longing are poetically visualised in “Longing’s Embrace”, an immersive video-installation. The images seen in the installation are fictionalised interpretations of my childhood, echoing themes such as emotional loneliness and isolation in which elements of both familiarity and discomfort prevail.

Meike Driessen is a multimedia artist using photography, video, text and installation whose work investigates themes such as vulnerability, trauma and identity.