Before I enter an abandoned building, I hesitate. Am I allowed to be here? Am I safe here? But usually my curiosity wins. Once inside the space, I become aware that I am alone here. In the silence and the darkness, I only hear the sounds that I and the building make. A footstep by me is answered by a creaking sound from the floor. The building no longer has a visible owner and is freed from purpose and function. For a moment, the space is mine, and I can give it my own meaning. I can wander around and open every door. I can stand still for a long time at a wall, and simply not think about anything. Wisdom and insights can emerge from my depths. I can allow secret desires to enter in complete peace. I can hide here, even when there is no danger. The space approves with everything.

With my work, I want to make such an experience available to others. The sites that inspire me are shaped by human presence but once abandoned, they enter a state of stagnation and decay as they become subject to land speculation and capitalist driven future scenario’s. However, spaces and places are more-than-human entities. They have a body and a soul, and they are in a constant state of transformation. Spaces have a memory that is both visible and invisible, and conversely, spaces exist in the memory of their inhabitants. The spaces that inspire me look like a film set, but they are not fictional. Here, reality is stranger than fiction.

My work responds to this ephemerality of our built environment in cities and landscapes, by identifying undefined spaces in places and buildings in transition. These are spaces without a clear function, often voids that arise unplanned. By recreating these voids in my work, I can remove them from their context and, rather than imitate them, create my own artistic interpretation, which allows for new meanings. I do this by working with what already is present in situ, visible or hidden. By removing elements and replacing materials, the previously unseen empty spaces transform into abstract, autonomous spaces. The voids become objects in which the viewer can, physically or through their imagination, dwell. The meaning the viewer attributes to the new space during this dwelling, the mystery of space and place they experience there, the site in the viewer's memory to which they may return through my work, all assign values of our built environment that lie far beyond the common capitalistic perspective on real estate. For these are values and meanings assigned by the viewer themselves, based on a personal, poetic experience of space and on the freedom to shape their own relationship and interaction with the space.