Artist statement

As an Anglo-Dutch artist ‘Thuis en welkom’ / ‘Home and welcome’ are central to my identity. My work is landscape focussed, a mix of figurative, impressionistic and abstract elements. Living in more than one country, my inspiration has been fuelled by the impact of migration over a lifetime. I started weaving after cancer treatment as a means of giving form to questions that emerged about which country I would die and be buried in.

The precariousness of life and remaining welcome in both my country of origin and my host country, carries echoes of the experience of migrants over generations. More recently, government migration policies have highlighted my precarious sense of welcome in both. This is reflected in the threatened coastal landscapes I weave. Brexit and Covid created greater separation. I wove contrasting landscapes that emphasized the differences between my homes, as well as more abstract small pieces where the warp and weft are pulling apart from each other.

In parallel with the tapestries, I create migration-based performances. In one performance, threads connect empty bird nests needing to find a place in a new location. In another I weave a non-seaworthy boat and launch it in the sea after writing Come or Go on the beach. More recent performances involved weaving interconnecting webs. To obtain family citizenship in both countries, I returned to the Netherlands to live in the forest I grew up with. My ambivalence about connecting past, present and future on both sides of the North Sea is expressed as a need for continuous (mycelial) connections over time: fungi and forest inspire my current work.

The heather fields of my home forest are maintained by flocks of sheep. Their fleece - undyed and dyed, spun and unspun - is an important part of the textural nature of my work. Giving form to the impact of migration and the attachment to more than one place is my ongoing thread.