Arts and culture

FSW Exhibition: Artworks from students and staff

Date: Thursday 25 September 2025 - Wednesday 31 December 2025
Address: FSW-gebouw
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden
Room: 1st floor and ground floor

From 25 September, we will be presenting our latest exhibition featuring a variety of artworks by five individuals from the FSW, including students and staff. Expect everything from paintings and digital and pencil drawings to photography and sculptures. The exhibition showcases the creative and artistic talents within the FSW community, and we are delighted to share these works with you.

Erica Hyatt is a professional painter and PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology at Leiden University, where she studies under Professor J.D. Blom. Her dual practice as both artist and researcher lies at the intersection of art and science, using painting as a medium to investigate distortions of human perception. Hyatt’s painting is informed by her research into Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS), a rare but fascinating neurological syndrome in which patients experience dramatic and usually transient alterations to perception of visual, auditory, and spatial stimuli as well as distortions to the psychological perception of time and perception of self.

Her recent series explores a perceptual phenomenon known as visual illusory spread, in which colors or patterns seem to extend beyond their physical boundaries. These works are at once academic and aesthetic. Hyatt employs traditional oil painting techniques, grounding her work in the lineage of classical realism, while weaving in modern geometric motifs and rhythmic patterns that echo the instability of perception itself. The result is a body of work that is captivating, precise, and subtly disorienting—paintings that appear to breathe and shift as the viewer looks on.

Hyatt’s practice is not only artistic but investigative: she uses her canvases as experimental sites to visualize perceptual distortions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. In doing so, she seeks to bridge subjective experience with clinical understanding, inviting audiences to consider how fragile, fluid, and constructed our sense of reality truly is.

Her art challenges the viewer to inhabit the altered perceptual world of AIWS, sparking both empathy and curiosity. Hyatt’s work stands at the convergence of art, neuroscience, and psychology, offering an intimate glimpse into the mysteries of the mind. At once scholarly and sensorial, her paintings transform the canvas into a mirror of human perception—unstable, expanding, and endlessly fascinating.

Fenna Poletiek is a cognitive scientist and artist whose career spans over two decades. She served as an assistant professor at Leiden University’s Institute of Psychology, was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and held special professorships at Aix-Marseille University (France) and Newcastle University (UK). While an undergraduate in Groningen, she took evening classes at Minerva Art Academy, and later joined a Marseille studio focused on figure and portrait drawing. Do the Mediterranean models feel different, more dramatic, more extrovert, than Dutch models? Can you tell which drawings were made in the North and which in the South?

Contact: Poletiek@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Stacked Rooms is an ongoing project about details of modern Architecture. I wanted to try architecture photography a couple of years ago, but I didn’t own a wide-angle lens, let alone a tilt-shift lens. So, I started using telephoto lenses to take photos of details and the images became more and more abstract. It’s about the details we tend to ignore and just pass by while we spend a significant amount of time in those boxes of steel, glass, and concrete.

Photography has been my hobby for about 10 years. Next to photographing architecture, I am interested in landscapes, street, astro, and documentary - A little bit of everything. For more information, visit juliansteinke.com.

My name is Marijke (Mayke) Visscher. I have worked at Leiden University for 40 years, most recently as a quality inspector for Cleaning and Maintenance at UFB.

I found a good balance between my 20-hour job and my passion as a visual artist. In my free time, I completed the 4-year program at VABK in Zeist, and I continue to learn every day.

Art is my life. Through the process of sculpting, I grow as a person—I see it as a true art of living. At the same time, it is also about hard work, striving each time for a beautiful end result.

I also work on commission, which is a very different process: a true collaboration between the client and me. Together we explore the form, talk, listen, and then bring the work to life with our hands.

I’m an anthropology student here at LU. I’ve been doodling on school desks and paper scraps since I can remember. I wouldn’t usually spend more than a couple hours on a single project until I started making portraits for my friends here in the Netherlands. The idea of giving personal, hand-made gifts motivated me to draw for longer and more often. I would first take a picture of my friend (or a good pic someone else took), and then digitally add colours and doodly shapes on top, until I felt like it.

Lately, I’ve grown bored with digital art and got back into drawing on paper, and I’m trying out some sculpting. Gifts made with the these mediums feel even more personal, as they really are one-of-a-kind, in contrast to indistinguishably replicable digital files.

The upcoming winter collection hoodies at boulderhal Krachtstof will probably have a drawing of mine on the back!