Success Stories

Pleun van Dijk

Pleun van Dijk is a Dutch designer who graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven in 2016. She currently finished her master in Material Futures at the Central Saint Martins in London from the Netherlands, due to COVID-19 restrictions. She is also a curator for the Future Materials Bank which is an archive, that researches a more sustainable artistic practice and is part of the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

Pleun’s work is focused on the future and human evolution. Through her work, she wishes to raise relevant questions and “trigger the generation of new thoughts and perspectives”. She is fascinated by the meaning of humanity and realized various projects about it; her current graduation piece called ‘Object of desire’ is about the boundary between human and technology. Pleun would characterize her work as a combination of thinking and making but also a reflection of all the things she has “seen, done, read, felt and experienced”.

She is proud of her work ‘Replika’ that was developed for the Roskilde festival in Denmark as it was her first big commissioned project that required outfit design, sculptures, installations and performance to think about. Her involvement with FASHIONCLASH started in 2017 for the collaboration around the campaign for the ‘Fashion Makes Sense’ edition and two of her sculptures from ‘Reborn’ were shown in the exhibition. Pleun did not intend to link this work to fashion at first; thus, FASHIONCLASH offered her a new perspective to explore. “I learned to appreciate the idea that the things you create can be used and interpreted in different ways by others. Once you finish something, you have to understand that it also starts to live its own life and this was the first time this really happened.”

In the future, she hopes to continue working on new perspectives and explore relevant topics which could help the public visualize and understand better some important social issues. “Art and design could become a tool that helps us make the right decisions and I hope to contribute to these debates through visual translations.”