Bastienne Kramer

Overview

For sculptor Bastienne Kramer I built a contemporary portfolio site that gives her work a clear, spacious presentation grounded in her long studio practice. The foundation is a simple, durable structure using Next.js and Sanity.io, but the real work was editorial: understanding her archive, shaping it, and giving it a visual logic that feels natural to her sculptures, installations, books, and studio notes.

Context and Challenge

Kramer’s material reaches across decades: exhibitions, objects, installations, residencies, books, experiments, and a large back catalogue that had lived partly on WordPress, partly in an older PHP site, and partly in offline folders. The challenge was to give this heterogenous body of work clarity without losing texture. The site needed to feel contemporary yet grounded, capable of hosting new writing and updates, while still doing justice to older documentation.

Approach

I started with the content itself. Before touching layout or interactions, I mapped each body of work, identified gaps, and reconstructed lost entries from the archive. The previous website had a tone that still carried value, so I took that as a starting point and gave it a new interpretation: more pared back, easier to navigate, and more focused on the work rather than the interface surrounding it.

At a key moment in the process, I had an in-studio session with designer Yvonne van Versendaal. She is exceptionally good at seeing what a portfolio is becoming rather than what it currently is. She sharpened the structure, challenged my assumptions, and made subtle yet decisive adjustments that aligned the presentation with the sensibility of Kramer’s sculptures. That session lifted the project out of the technical bubble and brought it fully into the realm of artistic presentation.

Impact

The result is a portfolio that is easy to update, visually coherent, and expansive enough to hold Bastienne’s ongoing work. It has already streamlined her editorial workflow and resurfaced years of archived material that had never been shown properly.

We are now exploring how to extend the site’s reach beyond the web. One direction is experimenting with text-to-video tools to upscale older archival footage and reintroduce it in a more contemporary form. Another is bridging the website’s structured content with social channels, reducing duplication and avoiding the siloing that often happens between a main portfolio and public-facing updates. The long-term aim is a single ecosystem where new work, documentation, and social output reinforce each other rather than live in parallel.