Before my decision to make a living in Australia, I had come here as a traveller a few times before. First time was in 1997…my first ever big trip overseas from Holland. Seven months of travelling with a round-the-world-ticket and Australia was one of our chosen countries. What an ocean of freedom and time we had!! It was unknown and life-changing! We gave Australia 4 out of the 7 months that we had for travelling. Once in Sydney we bought a $1000 car and headed west into the desert. Unfortunately after two weeks out of Sydney one of the common kind of accidents overcame us. My travelling partner fell asleep behind the wheel and a major accident happened. According to the police report the car had been rolling over its axes 5 times. The time it took for the car to roll over 5 times is still vivid somewhere in my mind. Those seconds were the longest seconds I have ever had. All I wanted was for the car to stop rolling. And so it did. And we were still alive. Once the violent, thundering noise of the car rolling over had stopped all the windows popped out of their frames, allowing for the dust of the desert to come in. Then a deafening silence came over us, followed by the realisation of what had just happened. I felt an excruciating pain coming up from my hip region what later proved to be a fractured pelvis. Then, from somewhere unknown deep inside of me came this primal scream which I wasn’t able to stop by myself. My travelling partner had to ‘shake me out of it’. Something I realised then and there was that in those fearful, life-threatening seconds there had been no physical pain, not a sense of the physical body being there. Now because of the horrendous pain in my pelvis my partner had to drag me out of the car through the front window frame and lay me down onto the sandy desert floor. We must have been the luckiest people on planet Earth, because right at that moment, there in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, a car came our way. A small group of tourists, a tour guide and a satellite phone. They called an ambulance and let us know it would take an hour for the ambulance to get to us. An hour!! An hour is a very long time when you are in excruciating pain! So I thought there was only one solution for me to be able to survive this painful hour; to get out of my body. I can’t remember if that worked out as well as I wanted to, but I do remember that suddenly then and there this intense ‘knowing’ came over me. For the first time of my life I was consciously happy to be alive, truly grateful for me still being there and then. And for the first time ever I thought: “I must be worth living, because I did not die”. So there I was, in excruciating pain and at the same time utterly happy and grateful from my heart.
From that day on magical moments started dripping into my life.
Later on during our trip (I decided that I didn’t want the fractured pelvis to ruin my once in a life time road-trip through Australia and so, after hospital and a short rehab time, we continued our journey) we went sailing for 3 days with a small group on a Catamaran over at the Whitsunday Islands. Three truly magical days they were! There while swimming at night time, surrounded by a mysterious, deep, dark ocean and deep dark sky, I experienced ‘Noctiluca’. The ocean, the water fully embracing my body was being illuminated by so called sea-sparkles ‘Noctiluca’, meaning ‘lights in the dark’. They are little algae that react to every touch by emitting light. It was a magical experience! Those little creatures also taught me a lesson. Their illumination is a self-defence mechanism, they light up for self-defence. It taught me to create and see the illuminating things in life for coping with the dark. And what illumination means for these little creatures, just simple self-defence, can bring us human beings such magical experiences.
‘Whenever you are touched you sparkle’
That first magical experience and those lessons brought me a lot of inspiration. It led to a whole heap of artworks.
Some of them showing here in these pictures. In 2009 I created a jacquard woven warntu/blanket called ‘Noctiluca’. Early 2010 this warntu/blanket brought me the inspiration for the collage of a warrior in a Martial Arts pose. Then during my first solo-exhibition in Japan in 2010 I made an installation depicting a Zen Buddhist monk in meditation while facing a blank wall, wearing my Noctiluca warntu/blanket.
‘Warntu’ is an Australian Aborigine word for ‘blanket’ or ‘skin’.
Leftover Universe 