I am a sculptor living in a wooden house in Amsterdam that I designed and built myself, across the water from the city centre. I work in a studio coöperative that I built with some friends in the harbor area, with my woodworking equipment and a generous stockpile of seasoned, local wood at hand. I have always loved being in a wood workshop, and now I can be there everyday! I love the process of making, that’s where my visual thinking happens, with my brain extending into my fingers. I really enjoy touching and shaping natural materials and through the making I tell the many stories of trees, transience and our contradictory relation to the living world we are part of. Wood and clay are the materials I shape to my ideas and I make them into sculptures and objects, often with traits of furniture, including picture frames and vitrines. Visual sources vary from the shape of a puddle in an Irish limestone landscape, a gasket found in an online shop, a cutoff piece from the studio floor. In my outdoor sculptures you’ll find rustic trestles and Donald Judd chair knock-offs rotting in the forest, combined with solid, wooden books and wooden panels in exuberant shapes. I’m using drawing to sketch a rough idea of a sculpture, after which I’m immediately picking up wood and hand tools to draw the work into the physical world. I’m outsourcing parts of the making to automated cutting or shaping, to feel and see more sharply what working by hand means today.
