Background
My fascination for soft mud clay probably stems from my childhood. Dad worked in civil engineering and sometimes I was allowed to go along. It was wonderful to dig in big mounds of earth and to watch the sludge that the sand dredgers vomited up.
When I became 11 years old, my family went regularly mudflat hiking from the sea dyke at Pieterburen. We walked by low tide through the Wadden sea to the Wadden islands. It was an adventurous expedition because you had to be there before the high tide came up. The first kilometers of the trip we swamped up to the ankles in the healthy stinking clay before we reached a sandy bottom. A great experience.
Kneading soft clay still gives me sensory pleasure and you can make almost anything from it. Every time when I made a piece I realise there is something else that needs to be tried out or tested. It’s like a wheel that keeps turning and turning around. I sincerely hope my work will last as long as the Chinese porcelain temple in Nanjing – Edmund de Waal mentioned in The white road – that stayed for six hundred years. My sculptures are meant as monuments of history about the transience of nature and the transience of life.
In my sculptures I focus on women in history, because they are hardly mentioned. With all important issues in the world, like war or politics you see always men, but there are women as well. Women in history are my main source of inspiration.
Education
Doctoraal history, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Ceramics, Daniel Levi and Bastienne Kramer