The artist

Wencke Van Amstel works under the Scandinavian translation of her name: She Who Bites. A title that encapsulates her practice: confrontational, uncompromising, and unapologetically feminine.

The Creative Process

She Who Bites’ creative process is intuitive and associative. She Who Bites operates as a human AI, fed by everything she has seen, learned, experienced, and stored. Connections emerge during the making process and sometimes only reveal themselves afterwards. Images, symbols, memories, current events, history, popular culture, fashion, religion, violence, sexuality, and personal experiences are collected and combined into highly detailed digital compositions, rich in symbolism.

Three Manifestations of the Same Oeuvre

She Who Bites moves between three autonomous but interconnected manifestations: digital, physical and experience.

Digital

The digital work emerges through intuitive and associative construction, bringing images, knowledge, experiences and cultural references together within a precisely controlled composition. The digital compositions of She Who Bites are constructed with an almost obsessive degree of precision and control. The digital work is an autonomous artwork in its own right, rather than a sketch for a later, physically ‘real’ work.

Physical

The physical manifestation introduces scale, materiality and presence. Monumental dimensions change the relationship between the work and the human body, while sublimation introduces chance, irregularity and damage. Its physical manifestation creates a fundamentally different experience. At a monumental scale, the density of the work becomes physical. The image can no longer be taken in at once: distance reveals the composition, while proximity exposes an overwhelming accumulation of details, symbols and visual information. The viewer has to physically move in relation to the work.

Materiality introduces another dimension. When a composition is transferred onto canvas through sublimation, the process can leave traces, shifts, irregularities and damage that did not exist within the controlled digital environment. These are not corrected in an attempt to recreate the digital original. Oil paint does not erase the damage. It responds to it. Damage is allowed to exist without judgement.

Immersive

Experience allows the work to move beyond the boundaries of the fixed image. Through movement, time, sound, space, interaction or immersion, elements of the work can be activated, isolated, enlarged or brought to life. Rather than reproducing the original artwork, these experiences open up new ways of entering its visual universe.

The seven works of EPIC FURY currently exist digitally. Their physical manifestations will be developed one work at a time. Each adds materiality, scale, damage and oil paint to the work, while exhibition adds space, encounter and physical experience. None is the ‘real’ version. Each is a different manifestation of She Who Bites.

The Beautifully Uncomfortable

She Who Bites’s work exists at the intersection of personal history and collective urgency. It transforms lived experience into visual language that confronts, questions, and connects. She does not aim to provide answers, but to create space; space for discomfort, recognition, dialogue, and change.

Within the visual language of She Who Bites, pop art, luxury branding, jewellery, and celebrity culture collide with themes of violence, control, and ownership. The work operates within the tension between beauty and threat, seduction and power. She Who Bites resists being confined to a single interpretation, creating space for ambiguity and discomfort. Attraction and repulsion can coexist. This is where The Beautifully Uncomfortable unfolds.

Beyond Morality

Throughout the work, themes of power, autonomy, gender, sexuality, care, violence, shame, vulnerability, and social conditioning recur. The work does not offer unequivocal answers, but instead challenges the often hastily formed categories and judgements through which we try to understand people and their behaviour.

She Who Bites refuses simple moral oppositions. Perpetrator and victim, strength and vulnerability, love and anger, care and suffocation, beauty and violence, freedom and dependency can exist within the same reality, and sometimes within the same person. The recurring angels and devils therefore do not represent good and evil. They embody different ways of entering and moving through the world: carrying the weight of what came before, or relatively unburdened by it. Neither position is superior. This tension between digital precision and physical unpredictability is fundamental to the artistic practice of She Who Bites.

Feminism

The feminism within She Who Bites operates from within its complexity. Women are not reduced to victims, heroes, mothers, sexual objects, or moral counterpoints to men. They can inhabit all these positions simultaneously and move beyond them again. They are allowed to be seductive, violent, caring, ambitious, damaged, vain, vulnerable, dominant, funny, angry, and loving. The work pushes back against the social structures and conventions that determine which of these qualities are permitted, valued, condemned, or denied, and to whom.