Nel Verbeke (Belgium, b. 1989) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. With a background in visual art and specialization in design and design research, Nel Verbeke is primarily a concept-designer. Balancing between arts and design, her vocation will always be the emotional potential of shape and space. Fascinated by conceptual thinking, she shies away from the obvious focus. ‘The concept serves as an ‘archway’ over the whole.’ Throughout her artistic practice, Nel Verbeke searches and formulates new arrangements of our surroundings. Her works are alternative compositions of time, space, motion and acts that, on the one hand, question our relation to the ambivalence of our emotions and, on the other hand, suggest that the emotional states of mind could be habitable spaces, shelters for a deepened moment of introspection and contemplation. As a consequence of her motives and methods, Nel Verbeke chooses not to delineate her artistic practice too rigidly. She prefers to explore a peripheral area where the autonomy of the artistic creation always meets a suggestion of its possible use. Her language is poetic and oud of time and so questions our dominant ways of seeing, acting and living. Nel Verbeke studied Concept Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven (NL), following an education in Fine Arts at Luca School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium.
