“With my art I hope to create awareness within the community that with a little bit of creativity and inventiveness a lot can be achieved.”
Roddney Tjon Poen Gie graduated from the ‘Academie voor Hoger Kunst en Cultuur Onderwijs’ (AHKCO) in Suriname in 1994 with a major in painting and drawing. He is a self-taught sculptor since 1995. He recently retired from the government department of Culture, where he was the supervisor of the State Art Collection.
With his art Roddney hopes to inspire people to be creative and use the wealth of materials that nature has to offer. In his own work, which can alternate between the world of fine art and that of craft making, he often works and experiments with materials from nature, which he processes and manipulates in such a way that the result is a unique art work or artifact. Pits and seeds, clay, bauxite, tropical wood and especially driftwood, are often used materials in his art.
Roddney has been an artist-in-residence at Duende in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, at the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont, USA and in 2014 at the Tembe Art Studio in Moengo, Suriname. In November 2017 Roddney participated in ‘Forest Art Guyane’, an art project in a forest in French Guiana, where he and other artists transformed large tree trunks into public art installations.