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.

Acting as a ‘human AI’, she collects fragments from the digital undercurrent of contemporary culture, translating them into layered compositions on canvas. The density of detail reflects her autism; a mode of perception in which nothing is secondary and everything carries meaning.

Work

Within her visual language, pop art, luxury branding, jewelry, 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 fixed interpretation, instead opening space for ambiguity and discomfort. Attraction and repulsion coexist, this is where the work unfolds.

Process

The works begin as highly detailed digital compositions, built up from carefully arranged visual fragments using digital painting and drawing techniques. The next stage encompasses the transfer to large-scale canvas. During transfer to canvas perfection is deliberately disrupted; damage and repair become integral to the work.

The seven works in this collection have already been developed digitally. As personal resources are currently insufficient, both the physical realisation of the works, their exhibition, and professional marketing and PR depend on external funding. Active efforts are being made to secure financial support through crowdfunding.

Context

She who bites’ practice engages with themes central to feminist discourse, including representation, agency, and the structural impact of rigid socioeconomic and cultural standards within a male-dominated society.

Rooted in lived experience of childhood sexual violence, her practice also engages with vulnerability, control, and the reclamation of agency. Her work resonates strongly with survivors, reframing experience not as limitation, but as a source of strength, representation, and reflection.

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.

Angels and devils

Within the work of She who bites, figures are positioned as angels or devils. Not as moral opposites or symbols of good and evil, but as distinct conditions of being human. Some are born carrying inherited weight, memory, and sensitivity, these are the ‘devils.’ Others are born with a more open, unburdened perspective; the ‘angels.’ Neither is superior; both are necessary, creating balance in how we experience power, vulnerability, and existence.

Collection and funding

The seven works in this collection have already been developed digitally. Funding is needed to finalize the pieces, prepare them for exhibition, and support professional marketing and PR. As personal resources are currently insufficient, active efforts are being made to secure financial support through crowdfunding. This collection marks the first step in a broader vision, in which She who bites evolves into an impact-driven platform for feminist art, open to collaboration with other artists.