My artistic journey, born from a life of global nomadism and rich but complex cultural experiences, is the relentless pursuit of truth about the essence of humanity, beyond the confines of the ego, belief systems, and societal facades.

I was born in Kumi, Uganda, in 1975, as one of four children of Dutch parents who were working for a Christian foundation to treat leprosy patients and to fight its social stigma across the world. Growing up in Ethiopia, the United States and the Netherlands offered me valuable exposure to different worlds and world views yet was also an overwhelming cultural and religious roller coaster. The conservative Christian environment in the US was particularly traumatizing as I was brainwashed into Jimmy Lee Swaggart's Pentecostalism at age 7 to 10, which would later become a source of deep internal conflict with my emergent sexuality. 

After three years in the US, we moved back to Ethiopia for another three years, before finally settling in the Netherlands. Not being fluent in my mother tongue and processing the various culture shocks, I had a hard time adjusting to school and was sent to a school for children with learning challenges for the final year of primary school at age 13. This type of school was associated with a lot of prejudice and it felt like getting branded as being "stupid". It brought me a deeply ingrained sense of inadequacy and self-sabotaging perfectionism. 

I was gifted a set for oil painting at age 12, while still living in Ethiopia. From then onwards, painting was my refuge and a way to process and express my struggles to find my place in society, in particular through self-portraits. Never feeling at home in the Netherlands, I started travelling extensively in my late teens, to Israel, Nepal, India, Australia, and New Zealand, sometimes volunteering for longer periods and painting murals wherever I could. Engaging with local communities through art revealed to me its universal power to inspire and connect. 

In 2000, I briefly attended the Royal Academy in The Hague and quickly realized that I preferred to pursue my own path as a self-taught artist. I continued to experiment with a wide range of subjects, materials, and techniques, but specialized in portraits and started doing them on commission. However, I had a hard time with the type of self-promotion required to get enough exposure, assignments, and income in order to become a full-time artist, so I usually worked on the side. 

Between 2008 and 2018, I worked in social services and youth advocacy roles in the Netherlands, which has profoundly shaped my understanding of the human condition. Engaging intensely with people has revealed to me the complexities of the mind and driven me to channel these insights into my art. In the same time period, driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand the human body and its intricate anatomy, I delved into the study of sports massage and integrative massage. This "hands-on" approach has similarly fed into my artistic practice, enabling me to capture the essence of the human form with greater accuracy and sensitivity.

My art was a tool for me to process and heal from intense social experiences while growing up and to recognize and reveal beauty in the uniqueness of individuals as a source of hope. However, oil painting was tightly connected to my past and brought with it a range of limiting associations. So when I stumbled onto the opportunity to switch to sculpture, I embraced it as my new visual language, allowing me to break through old blockages and to use the three-dimensional form to add new depth to my expressions of the human experience. 

Since 2018, I have lived a nomadic lifestyle in Guernsey, Cyprus, and Portugal with my husband Shaun. However, we are planning our next move to establish a permanent home and a dedicated sculpture studio by 2024. With a new and strong sense of direction and purpose for my art, I am currently working on a new series and bursting with new inspiration and ideas. Stay tuned!