Anna Frijstein is a Dutch artist based in the UK, where she completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in London (2019).

Frijstein’s practice playfully evokes the bestial side of socialised, domesticated human beings. She embodies animals, plants, planets, foods, and other beings, scrutinising human behaviour in absurdist, surreal performances, drawings, paintings, collages, videos, and sculptural installations. Beneath childlike gestures and poetic titles lies an unsettling layer of dark humour charged with socio-psychological and ecological unease. Discarded cardboard, found textiles, her own clothes, and other preloved materials are ritualistically re-used as surfaces for drawing and writing. This urge to re-use is also apparent in her visual language, where drawings, patterns, and words compulsively reappear throughout her work. Repetition functions as a performative strange loop of exorcism; a way of mimicking the same thing until it no longer behaves like itself.

Alongside her studio practice, she works on social, interdisciplinary, and collaborative projects. In 2021 Frijstein was awarded the Young Talent Grant from the Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands, and received the DYCP grant from Arts Council England in 2024 for research and new work exploring motherhood and mental health. Since early 2025 she runs Not Another Happy Playgroup_ a hangout club for bad mothers where art, mental health, play, and politics come together.

Looping themes throughout her work and research include: Performance & Play (ByeBye Patriarchy); Twisted Pedagogy*; Female Rage; Mimicry & Memes; Track & Trace Authenticity, Emotional (Un)Learning; Ecologies4All, and her latest, Motherhood & Exorcism*.

*Mike Kelley

**Louise Bourgeois