Carlijn Jacobs’ arresting photographs celebrate beauty and artifice

“In the fairytale, as we know it, [the heroine] is sent to sleep as a punishment for being too curious about the spinning wheel,” Carlijn Jacobs tells Dazed, reflecting on her current show, Sleeping Beauty. “I do the opposite. I celebrate women’s curiosity and I encourage them to keep on dreaming and exploring.”

Known for creating mesmerising, surreal imagery with compositions of striking colours, Jacobs blurs the fields of fashion and fine art photography as well as obscuring the lines between reality and fantasy. Currently running at Foam in Amsterdam, Sleeping Beauty – which brings together commissioned work and self-initiated work from Jacobs’ archive – distils these uncanny and otherworldly elements, drawing on a world of unique references and personal obsessions… beauty, light, architecture, animals, identity, sexuality, storytelling, artifice, disguise, surrealism, theatricality, geishas, and much more.

Curated by Mirjam Kooiman, the show invites visitors into the artist’s mindscape. “Sleeping Beauty comes with surprises and you enter different kinds of rooms. Me and Mirjam were trying to replicate the interior of my brain. It’s like a little walk through my mind; through my dreams.” The photographer also collaborated with Dutch designer and artist Sabine Marcelis to create this extraordinary physical environment for the exhibition. A mirrored floor and mirrored walls in the vernissage create a disorientating doubling effect while the windows with coloured foil “creates interesting light play”.

“Marcelis is a light magician and she knows how to change spaces,” Jacobs tells Dazed. “For me, she is the perfect match to collaborate with. She works a lot with glass and colours and her objects almost feel like you want to eat them. I feel there are similarities with my work in there, sometimes people say they also want to eat my photos as they often have a glossy texture.”

One of the influences permeating many of Jacobs’ delicious photographs are Japanese culture and aesthetics. “[I’m intrigued by] the unique blend of tradition and modernity in Japan; also the detailed attention to everything in life… the pureness, the theatre, the beauty,” she explains. An aspect of Japanese culture she finds particularly alluring is the world of the geisha. “For me, geishas are interesting because they transform themselves inside and outside. I went to Kyoto and they played music right in front of me and we spent a couple of hours with them – a unique experience.”

While it’s possible to trace these recurring themes haunting her work, Jacobs’ images are, ultimately, examining the idea of “transformation, in its broadest sense”. In her hands, pageantry, disguise, artifice, and theatricality are liberating. “Masks free us from reality,” she says, recalling her experience of the carnival in Venice. “People dress up in masks and you can’t recognise them. Within my fashion work I kind of do the same thing.”

For a closer look at some of the photographs on display in Carlijn Jacobs’ Sleeping Beauty, visit the gallery above.

Carlijn Jacobs’ Sleeping Beauty runs at Foam in Amsterdam until January 21, 2024.

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