STATEMENT

I make this work because I am trying to understand what it means to be alive. I want to understand my soul in relation to the world. Art is a way to create moments where the world can feel larger than myself. I am chasing a feeling I have known since childhood—a moment that dissolves the boundaries of my body and I feel connected to something greater. Standing in endless Dutch flower fields, surrounded by millions of individual blooms, I felt my sense of self fall away. That experience of the sublime continues to guide everything I make.

My practice grows from necessity. After becoming a mother, I struggled to find a way to make art within the demands of family life. When my grandmother—a fiber artist from Rotterdam—passed away, I inherited the embroidery floss of her fiber arts community. I began cross-stitching as a way to keep making. The predetermined structure of the simple cross stitch allowed me to build slowly while leaving room for thought. Each stitch is an individual unit of color; together they create something far greater than their parts. That relationship between the individual and the collective became the foundation of my work.

I eventually moved my stitching from fabric onto window screens after realizing that a screen is both a barrier and a threshold. It separates one space from another while allowing light, air, ether and unseen forces to pass through. For me, the screen is a metaphor for the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the living and those who came before us. Currently, screens on our phones are a portal to worlds, both internal and external. As my children grew more independent, my fabric screens grew larger, eventually becoming monumental installations that viewers can walk among.

My understanding of color is shaped by many influences: childhood days counting flower bulbs in my family's warehouses, years studying biology, my work as a graphic designer color-correcting images pixel by pixel, and years in studying art masters at the Barnes Foundation. Whether looking through a microscope, arranging colored blocks, or studying digital pixels, I have always been fascinated by how countless individual units combine to create something entirely new. Life itself feels this way. One plus one does not simply equal two—it is an opportunity for something unexpected, mysterious, and alive. Science can explain how cells function, yet it cannot explain what transforms carbon into life. That mystery is where my work begins.

Plants are the central metaphor in my practice because they embody our inseparable relationship with the Earth. They feed us, shape civilizations, carry memory, generate wealth, and bear witness to both beauty and injustice. Plants have their own value system. 

I reject the hierarchy that separates fine art from craft, this division is cultural, not inherent. By embracing cross stitch embroidery, a traditionally undervalued stitch in an undervalued medium, I honor generations of makers while questioning the systems that determine artistic value.