AMBASSADOR
Sandra De Clerck

Sandra De Clerck is an artist who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Her career as an artist began in 1993 after completing a seven-year course in Monumental and Plastic Arts at the St. Lucas Institute in Ghent. After which she continued her professional development and technical expertise through assistantships with prominent artists worldwide such as Ursula Huth, Jocelyne Prince and Judith Schaechter.

Sandra De Clerck's work investigates the narrative and expressive possibilities of glass using a wide range of techniques such as stained glass, blown glass, kiln casted glass and pâte-de-verre. Her artistic approach to the medium contributes to it's continued elevation to a larger autonomy, apart from utilitarian or decorative ends. De Clerck achieves this by revitalizing ancient techniques of process and applying them to contemporary themes. She frequently uses the style of anachronistic confusion in her latest work.

De Clerck's current themes are primarily female centric and illustrate the unprecedented pressure European society (in specific) is placing on women to conform to certain unrealistic cookie-cutter standards. Her work addresses the record numbers of women enduring plastic surgeries such as breast augmentation as a result of strong externally imposed pressure from advertising and society to look a certain way. She selects and appropriates an array of gender specific visual components, restructuring them into grand unachievable symbols. In so doing, De Clerck challenges societal imposed ideas of the status of women. Such works include a life-size figure bust, which is a veiled self portrait with enormous augmented breasts made out of incredibly seductive transparent pink glass.

Since 2003 De Clerck has been the department head of IKA glass at the Institute of Arts and Crafts in Mechelen, Belgium (www.ikamechelen.be). De Clerck has been a curator of glass exhibitions in museums in Europe such as "Belgium Glass" in Riihimaki Finland and has been a guest lecturer and teacher in various Universities in Europe and the U.S. including the Estonian Academy of Arts and the University of Helsinki. Her work is represented in private and museum collections around the world.

Sandra De Clerck
Godshuishammeke 8
B-9000 GhENT
België

www.ikamechelen.be