The apartment, three stories high, is spacious and light. Sand colored carpet throughout the rooms absorbs all sound. Dark, colonial, shiny polished furniture is trying to come to terms with the northern light of Holland. The table is set with rows of heavy silver cutlery and powdery green Wedgewood crockery. The apartment is filled with the smell of roast chicken, freshly ironed linen and that of my Grandmothers unfiltered cigarettes.
There she is, surrounded by wisps of smoke, sitting in her small sewing room. In my young eyes she is already an old woman, with angular, big-boned hands and a creased face, but at the same time svelte and very dignified, completed with a sharp dark eye and a firm mouth. Her sewing machine came into my possession after she died. It’s powdery green, like her crockery.
She was a self-made woman, an autodidact couturier, working from Vogue sewing patterns. Some of her pieces are still cherished in our family: baby clothing, a blanket, a delicate nightgown and girlish flared dresses, embroidered tablecloths made when she got older. Whenever I see these objects, I see her hands. And I see myself as a child, sitting next to her, wrapped in indefinite times.
While I am working on the art shown here, my Grandmother is present. Stitch by stitch, pinprick by pinprick; I feel as though I am reworking her work (some of my artworks are actually made after some of her pieces), and I get a sense of identification and of belonging, of stretching lives, of continuity.
A little bit of gold, a little bit of you is made after a baby cardigan, worn by me when I was little, and made by my Grandmother. She also made, and wore, the nightdress depicted in Skin. The objects portrayed in the series Heavenly Bodies and I Am Fragile Just Like You go beyond the personal and resonate a shared collective memory of the apron as a cultural symbol.
Objects and materials that surround us live on in our minds. They shape our memories and become part of our story, of who we are. In itself lifeless things become symbols associated with our existence: a feeling, a mood, an event or a person. We fuse them with meaning, thus shaping our self-images, our histories, our cultures.
With this work I research the material and the immaterial, striving to express tension between the tangible and the intangible. Like the memories evoked by the objects portrayed, I want these works to be volatile, echoing a feeling, a mood, an event or a person. Since long I have chosen paper as a material to work with, because of it’s fragile quality. It is this quality that I like to maintain, while at the same time challenging it. Be it by forcing it in seemingly robust, geometric shaping, like I do in my 3D paper objects. Or by contrasting it with texture, giving it a tactual dimension, enhancing the paper’s material presence.
Every pinprick is considered, mistakes are not easily made undone or easy to transform. The devotion and the high level of concentration I need for this technique is exactly what draws me to it: it brings me in a state of mind where time and space are stretched or even altered.
I am identifying with the object I am portraying and I find myself to be really ín the work I am making. If you take time and look at it carefully, you will find that your eyes keep wandering over the surface and that you are seized by moments of the same intoxication, imagining yourself to be folded in the material, wondering about the people who once have worn these objects, finding meaning, and sharing with me the poetry of everyday objects.