Near Enough to Remember, Near Enough to Forget
Blanco, Ghent, Belgium, 2024
This body of work reflects on aging, memory, and the quiet forms of care that surround them. It considers the vulnerability of later life, while also attending to the comfort found in repetition, familiarity, and human connection.
The works approach memory not only as something that can be lost, but as something carried, preserved, and continually reconstructed.
Backyard gatherings, (mom is a funny woman)
KASK, Ghent, Belgium, 2022
The commercialization, politicization, and promotion of positive thinking as an ideology often produce paradoxical effects. Within neoliberal culture, the belief that positive thinking alone enables individuals to achieve any goal reinforces the idea that success or failure depends solely on personal effort, obscuring the structural inequalities and economic, cultural, and social conditions that shape people's lives. In an increasingly competitive environment, where success is treated as the ultimate measure of worth, failure is internalized as a sign of personal inadequacy, often resulting in marginalization.
For Backyard Gatherings, I created a fictional setting in which humans and creatures coexist, each attempting to tell their own stories and assert their presence within the landscape. Drawing on pop culture and wellness culture, the project reflects on contemporary ideals of self-optimization and the pressures to conform to dominant expectations of beauty, aging, and success. Through fragmented, everyday narratives, it examines how these ideals permeate ordinary life, shaping subjectivity and interpersonal relationships.
Rattle toys (so that women do not cry)
Haarlem, the Netherlands, 2021
Traditionally, rattles are among the first objects given to infants. They offer comfort, soothe crying, stimulate the senses, and introduce the relationship between movement, sound, and response. Beyond infancy, rattles have also held symbolic and ritual significance across different cultures, where their sounds have been connected to protection, healing, communication, and connection.
In ancient Greece, rattles were used as infant toys, with their sound believed to protect children from harmful forces. Children played with various toys, including animal-shaped rattles and dolls. These dolls, known as plaggonas, held particular significance in the lives of young girls. Before marriage, they were dedicated to Artemis as part of a ritual marking the transition from girlhood into womanhood. Beyond play, these objects participated in the symbolic preparation of girls for the social roles, responsibilities, and expectations of womanhood in ancient Greek society.
My sculptures transform the rattle from an object of infancy into a symbolic gesture of care addressed to women. Rooted in the roles and social positions assigned to women in ancient Greece and extending toward contemporary experiences, the work reflects on the persistence of systems of gendered expectations and inequalities, and the different ways they continue to shape women’s lives across historical, geographical, and social contexts.
These rattles are not intended as functional objects, but as vessels for a collective emotion. They emerge from my perception of a shared sadness carried by women across different eras and circumstances - not as an inherent condition, but as an emotional trace of the social, cultural, and political forces that have shaped women’s experiences. In my mind, I hear a collective crying: a sound that travels across generations, connecting childhood, womanhood, care, vulnerability, and resilience.
Selected paintings
2017 - 2020
This selection of paintings from 2017–2020 explores different aspects of womanhood and the ways female identity is shaped through social roles, expectations, and everyday experience.
The works depict women in situations ranging from work and exercise to pregnancy, marriage, and domestic life, examining the relationship between the individual and the roles through which femininity is represented and experienced.
Together, these paintings trace an evolving interest in the female figure and in the complexities of inhabiting, performing, and negotiating womanhood.