About

The storybook/ Het sprookjesboek

I sit at home as I write this, surrounded by mess — the kind you make, and the kind made for you. Fluff and feathers barely conceal what’s seeping through the cracks. Anguish, dreams, sparkles. I adorn myself within it all.

I make mess. I am mess.

My practice lives inside this tension: being both inside and outside the scene, performer and witness. I exist inside my own theatre.

I grew up spellbound by Jim Henson’s Labyrinth — seduced by illusion, danger, and escape. That world gave me a language before I had the words. My painting practice grows from this terrain: fantasy, rupture, dress-up, and the moment when the mirage finally shatters.

I draw from lived experience as a survivor of abuse, using fairytales as tools for survival, subversion, and truth-telling. Once, I hid behind metaphor and language. Now, I’m interested in cracking the egg — exposing what’s been dressed up as safety. I reclaim fairytales through feminist and surrealist lenses, exploring moral ambiguity, power, and desire. If the wolf were obvious, we’d know to run.

My paintings operate like burlesque. They flirt with illusion, seduction, and exposure — red curtains, bright lights, the thrill of being seen, then vanishing backstage. Performance, costume, and the body become stages for rehearsing survival. I conceal and reveal. I play dress-up as both pleasure and strategy.

I’m drawn to the uncanny: flimsy constructions, cardboard façades, forgotten pleasure sites, glowing windows at night. Paint becomes illusion, surface, disguise. Truth, for me, lies in emotional accuracy — if something feels off, it probably is.

My work exists between sincerity and spectacle, fantasy and fracture. Through painting and performance, I explore how survival is learned through role-play — and how those roles can be undone.