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SPLITTER SPLATTER at work

The daily life of absurdist performance act Splitter Splatter, what do these colorful creatures do every day, what keeps them busy?

Splitter Splatter at Het Resort, Groningen — © Het Resort

By using symbolic, surrealistic shapes and totems that refer to rituals, the subconscious and the absurd, playful and intuitive worlds are built. Costumes, music, videos, set designs, ceramics and wall hangings, welcome to Splitter Splatter's unique colorful handcrafted world.

Splitter Splatter

Splitter Splatter (Iekeliene Stange) is a multidisciplinary artist, living between Amsterdam and the Veluwe. She is often inspired by nature and works with symbolic, surrealistic shapes and totems that refer to rituals, the subconscious and the absurd. In a playful and intuitive way she creates costumes, music, videos, set designs, ceramics and wall hangings to build her colorful worlds.
As an audiovisual band, Splitter Splatter has been performing in Amsterdam and the surrounding areas for several years and have been seen in living rooms, art galleries, in the water, music festivals, floats, etc. The band, consisting of professional crafter Iekeliene Stange, musician and artist Ibo Bakker and multidisciplinary artists Tjitske and Iteke Hemkes and Olga Middendorp, together they form an abstract, almost Dadaistic musical theater.

Soft, Powerful with Soul

In 2021 we were asked to give a short performance for a very nice children's program about art, of course we participated with great enthusiasm! For several years we had been working with costumes made of cardboard, which were glued together with glue guns. After an annoying leak in the warehouse where everything was stored, all our beautiful brightly colored objects were destroyed by water damage. COVID had also started in the Netherlands in the meantime and this brought a lot of silence to all areas of society. As a result, I also spent more time in nature and after the accident with the cardboard, I thought, what is a beautiful material instead of cardboard. That's how I ended up with wool, a material that is thrown away a lot these days because people find it too time-consuming to process. Knitting is incredibly meditative and little by little I started experimenting with it. Knitting mills and knitting rings were used to create different patterns. Each costume a personal ode to the person it was made for, that's how our knitted band came into being. The goal is to ultimately create a costume that is completely self-spun from local sheep and dyed with natural plants and dyes.

Lord of the Flies

After working with ceramics for a few years, I started a larger ceramic statue in 2017. The legs were finished in 2018, but then stood lonely in the studio for years. In the summer of 2022, the Pluk de Nacht film festival asked me to make a visual work, which was a good reason to finish the legs. One of my favorite activities is gardening and I spend a lot of time on the Veluwe in the spring and summer, where we have a small vegetable garden. Working in the garden is always incredibly relaxing and there is nothing better than picking your own vegetables and fruit from the garden and putting them on your sandwich! There is also always so much to discover, birds, insects, sometimes there is a hedgehog in the garden or a small owl. So I started working on the statue, inspired by the insects in the garden, as an ode to our garden and all the little creatures that live there.

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About iekeliene stange

Iekeliene Stange is a multidisciplinary artist who works with mixed materials to create costumes, music, set designs, installations and sculptures to build her fantastical worlds. She has been performing with her colorful costumed band Splitter Splatter in and around Amsterdam for several years.

Splitter Splatter at Het Resort, Groningen — © Het Resort

Splitter Splatter in the studio — © Het Parool

Splitter Splatter in Vogue — © Barrie Hullegie

Lord of the Flies — © Iekeliene Stange