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 Ghosts, 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.
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, echoes.
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.
