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. This image comes from many candid pictures of my queer friends partying. I cut out and collaged their figures again and again until a fictional composition appeared. I slowly painted shapes following the leaks and stains from the first layers of abstract violet turpentine on the canvases. Always staying open to intuitive redirection. The dripping and fragmented nature of this work embodies a mode of unproduction, rejecting the constriction of female and queer bodies. Figures haunt and overgrow the drained wetlandscape. This garden cannot contain those who live outside of the orders of society.

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. Starting from my smaller paper works I make freely, but often disregard as process. These turn out to be some of my most sensual material pieces that I set in stone with this concrete technique. As a wetlandscape painter, or "polderschilder", I aim to challenge the traditional notion of “untouched wilderness” and invite a critical rethinking of how the boundaries of landscapes and bodies are constructed. Inspired by the structured grid of the Dutch agrarian horizon. This framework questions the constriction of categorical thinking of the Dutch "polder mentality".

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 grandmother grew a particularly resilient flower, she would bring part of the stem for my mother to plant in our garden, too. This Polder 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". The women who build our surroundings are often invisible, but in this painting the negative space of her subject glows. A landscape built for profit often ignores the acts of care that ground us.

My Vegan Leather Heels Will Outlive Me, My Spine My Landscape

These works explore the primitive core of our bodies that will always cycle back to the land. A posthuman body in its representation might already double as a corpse, making the painted figure a spectral in-between state. The spine as a centre that carries weight which releases in the soil. The shovel sculpture frames the narrative but is directed as an invitation to the body of the audience.

Her Spine 

2025

'End Of Reality'  Exhibition

I organized this exhibition in techno club Radion in collaboration with The Platform, which curated a night of music and performances. 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. Here bodies came together through the forces of dancing, drag, watching, touching and listening.

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', a series that reads as a cyclical transformation between stages of womanhood and mythical escapism. Following my study of ecology and feminist sciencefiction.Part of the installation 'Fragments of a Nocturnal Prey', a series that reads as a cyclical transformation between stages of womanhood and mythical escapism. Following my study of ecology and feminist sciencefiction.

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.

A sculpture that in another form explores feelings of being stuck in a body and a body of art.

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