By Quinda Verheul
180 x 140 cm, 2022
Mirror and concrete

Recently, Quinda Verheul created a new series called Never Lost. Within her practice, different series often highlight different aspects of the same topic or theme. In this case, Quinda dove into the work of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) who she grew to admire. Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view. In his biography, he talks about his observations of landscapes and connects his ideas to those of romanticists like Goethe. Von Humboldt motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity. On the basis of observations generated during his travels, he described local impacts of development causing human-induced climate change and warned future generations about it. In her reflective works, Quinda Verheul explores these ideas and puts forward the idea that everything is more connected that one might think. The stars, the planet, drastically changing landscapes, and humans in the midst of it all.