‘New cultures have shown me new ‘ordinariness’,
new forms of the everyday; which are beautiful to me’
It’s in my DNA to be inquisitive and to explore and so my life has been a series of creative outings, expeditions around the globe.
In my home country, Holland, I worked as a news journalist and then later, in my early thirties, I made radio documentaries. I felt totally at home in my life and in my chosen genre. I thrived on telling stories for my work.
Being comfortable is nice, but it didn’t feed my creative inquisitiveness. So I made the unsettling decision to leave Holland. With my family, I travelled widely and challenged myself creatively in unfamiliar surroundings.
From a structured start in Zurich to cultural adventures in Cairo, from the crazy cosmopolitan of Guangzhou to the wild city of Hong Kong, constant change generated a need to find beauty in the chaos.
As I grappled with new ways of living, words could no longer effectively convey my experience. Instead, I turned to photography, as I had done throughout my life; as a student I had won a photography award, sponsored by the Stedelijk Museum and the Parool newspaper, for a picture series about Amsterdam.
Now, I capture images of unstruck beauty in unlikely places, glory in unrigged alleys. My cultural earthquakes have made me the artist I am today. I have returned to the language of photography to seize the beauty and grace that I cherish as ever-present in the teeming, raw chaos of city life.
