The hallucinating imagery of Fiona Lutjenhuis show how human longing for belonging can spill into sectarian extremes. Through her art, she opens the door for a more expansive psyche, that welcomes the magical and the intuitive as part of everyday life, restoring a sense of connection with the natural world around us.

"Lutjenhuis is known for the sometimes dreamy, sometimes disturbing worlds she creates in her paintings and installations. They are reinterpretations of the stories from her childhood, which was marked by the Malva sect that her parents had joined. Lutjenhuis looks back on theosophical ideas, esoteric cosmologies, and stories about extraterrestrial life with wonder and humor, where she continuously creates space for an open gaze in her work. Within this realm, nature and the more-than-human form a common thread. Daddy Long Legs and the Web (of Lies), for example, is about her father telling the secrets of the forest. By always striving for the rational, Western society has lost its connection with nature, and Lutjenhuis tries to bridge this distance. Her work can be seen as a call to open our psyche, so that the magical wonders of nature can make their entrance again. The frightening images of doom and prophecies that her parents believed in can above all indicate mental instability, but they also symbolize a broader, intrinsic human drive for meaning, which within the constraints of the sect was indeed written in hyperbole. Despite her oppressive upbringing, Lutjenhuis’ work calls for the creation of your own, personal myths, and this might not be such a bad idea after all. Myths make us humble, as they are able to counter anthropocentric thinking. If you believe in spirits and other entities, then you believe that we are not alone. This way, Lutjenhuis has literally elevated dealing with a difficult past into an artform, and she does so with patience and grace. "

From The Freedom of Myth by Jasmijn T.E. Mol