Title: Joempiezelje
Paintings
Year: 2017

Three generations women in my family, me, my mother and my mothers mother, had this Frysian word in our mind that we thought meant something like 'hug, caress, love': Joempiezelje. We looked in dictionaries, looked it up online, asked around, but this word was nowhere to be found, no matter how we spelled it. Did we make it up? Was it a false memory, or a slightly altered one? 

I started painting from memory, certain images and stories I wasn't sure about. They might have happened and they might not. It could be a half lost memory, or something I saw on a picture once and that I incorparated somehow, or it could be complete fiction. I am not interested in whether this 'memory' is real or not, I am fascinated by what can come into being through this different half-realities, laying on top of each other, questioning each other, existing in the same space.