Drain Me Softly - Garden of Overflow

Everything is a garden in a man-made world. ‘Poldergeist’, the spirit lingering in the Dutch polder landscape, is built from water and human traces. The muddy and frictional nature of this series embodies a mode of unproduction, rejecting the commodification of female and queer bodies. Figures search for a rooted belonging while resisting the frames of aesthetic entrapment.

Hot Pink Mud in the Smoke Machine

In the dissociative blur of collective cattle-like movement in the club, I might experience beyond my trapped image. Sweat evaporates to the architecture and drips into the concrete mud. Part of my new project capturing, draining and reframing the 'Poldergeist'. Embodying this drained entity connects the process of painting to the speculative construction and deconstruction of the Polder landscape. The Polder, with its fluid boundaries of water as a framework to reflect on the radical interdependence of human creation and natural landscapes.

Polderscape 

A grid fragmentation of a Polder landscape. 

 'End Of Reality'  Exhibition

This exhibition took place in techno club Radion in collaboration with The Platform that curated a night full of music, performances, piercers and diverse alternative creatives. The project comes from a reflection on the modes of organizing seen in art and nightlife. A wish to connect with an audience who is used to the 'gore', party-dom of nightlife, but perhaps doesn't feel at home in conventional art spaces. Their bodies here came together through the forces of dancing, embodying, drag, watching, touching and listening - making the night a space of reflection beyond hedonism.

This painting is inspired by my grandmother who as a biologist has spent her life studying and growing plants and my mother who as she ages is gardening more and more too. When my grandma had a strong flower she would bring part of the trench for my mother to plant in her garden too. This Polder (low-lying tract of land) practice of growing life out of mud and artificial land out of water, forces a posthuman understanding of nature and a reframing the problematic concept of "untouched wilderness". In the polder roots, nature contains the overwhelming presence of human traces.

Her Spine 

call to delifestock

This work is the beginning of a research into the populist aestheticization of extractivatist land ownership by agriculture, which in the current state owns the majority of Dutch land mass. This historically dominant cattle industry is the most concentrated in the world and bigger than ever before, while environmentalists fight for the urgency of bringing sustainability to our land for the interest of people over industry. Imaging a subversion of the political aesthetics is a way to explore different ways we are allowed to connect to land. These topics connect to me closely as I grew up around farms in between Haarlem and Amsterdam working with horses, cows, sheep and all types of agricultural labour.

6 stages

The following works are part of the installation ‘fragments of a nocturnal prey’ that reads as a cyclicle transformation between fragments of womanhood and mythical escapism, working with natural magical elements as stages of a queer utopian imagination.

Stage: Fight or Flight, Imagination Of the Key

145 x 83 cm (65 inch tv) oil on canvas

This painting invites the viewer to position themself as the subject in the experience of feeling unsafe at night. Following my early process questioning the politics of painting, specifically painting a subject in their most vulnerable state, which reproduces the violent gaze, inspired by the discussions of Miriam Cahn’s work ‘fuck abstraction !’ in Palais de Toyko. This gaming inspired POV (point of view) amplifies the surreal dissociating moment, that many femmes share, of imagining an everyday item that you need to get home, as potential life saving weapon, without ever daring to use it - a simulacrum of violence. This fragment of speculative violence also functions as a symbol for the division of those who do and don't share this fear and therefore the exclusion from free nocturnal movement.

she ate the fruit of wisdom
adam is after her ever since
trapped she stayed in the
underworld
by orpheus eyes of betrayal
even in the trees she could not
find salvation from apollo
her roots got stuck
bonifatius cut her sacred tree
body down
in the name of christ
siding with adams god
her heathen kin honoured her
and cut down bonifatius
- this tyrant saint 

oil on 107 x 92 cm canvas

.Genesis of the Mycelium

Following a recidency at the Accademia Unidee.

Ijmuiden, NL, where the industrial Tata (Steel) Plant currently resides, the byproducts of manufacturing are a topic of discourse in regards to their proven but systematically hidden detrimental effects on the immediate environment and nearby population’s health. “Zwarte sneeuw” was the ultimate manifestation of the harmful powders exhaled from the plant, coating Wijk aan Zee and the adjacent beach black. There are now fences with thorny barbed wire circling the Plant.

Following the traces of these hazardous substances through documentation, and together with the native plants around The Plant, and their inherent defence and hazard-signalling spiked structures, we map the visibility of the different poisons in, from and around Tata. In an attempt to taxonomize, sample and challenge extractivist practices, this  collaboration with Cari Calinici brings forth an interpretative aestheticization of pollution through representing the character of the Plant.

Tata Steel on polaroids

100 x 70 cm mixed media paint made from foraged pollution pigments, iron,   and charcoal on paper