Wintertime

Winter, to me, is quite a straightforward season. The cold and rain aren’t exactly my favorite weather conditions, but I do understand the time in which nature finds itself. I can only moderately appreciate the exuberant richness of color in summer. These days, I find flowers to be exaggerated, elusive, fleeting, and arrogant personalities. Give me the substance of branches, bark, stones, and leaves — those are things you can have a proper conversation with. Long live the roots: unseen, they go their own way. Reliable and enduring, they make all that exuberance above ground possible.

It might also be that my judgment has changed because I’ve developed more sensitivity to the unseen.
This alternative perspective, without the dominance of visual perception, was what inspired Pauline Oosterhoff to seek out collaboration. After a short and intensive process (the Rietveld Academy works with tight deadlines), we were able to present the results from March 19 to 25, 2025, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Linlin van Lonkhuyzen made a short documentary about our process.

This collaboration was very meaningful for both of us — and not just for us. In my humble opinion, we also managed to clearly demonstrate how enriching it can be to listen to someone else’s perspective. Pauline and I sat on the same bench in the same garden and arrived at entirely different imaginations. Not so much because of the materials we worked with, but more due to how we viewed the life cycle of the plant through our own way of perceiving. Pauline then dared to take on the challenge of thinking through her hands and created a beautiful wooden sculpture. For me, it feels as if the pot Wintertijd (“Wintertime”) that I made was truly born there — or unearthed.