Dark Matter

Your home should be a safe place, a place where you can retreat, a place where you can be yourself. Not everyone has that luxury; much more can happen behind closed doors than you can see. The house no longer feels like your own and you don't feel at home in yourself either.

Based on the poems written by Linde, I created my visual work. Based on text, I tried to get my interpretation on paper. The feeling of not being able to recognize your own home anymore.

The Ice Cube

For the off course Dark Matter, I entered into a co-creation with someone who has experienced organized sexual abuse. Together we worked to visualize her story. Each story is unique and everyone processes experiences in their own way. Although we had valuable conversations, this project turned out to cause too much tension and stress for her, causing her to block.

I therefore chose to make this aspect of her processing central to my work. Because she often froze and had trouble speaking for a long time, she found a way to express her feelings by stamping with letters. This form of communication inspired me to work with stamps in clay, which led to these works of art. 

A whole world

When we had our first conversation, I often got the urge to say sorry to him. It broke me to hear what someone can go through at a young age. When the words “abuse” and “mindcontrol” were mentioned I really didn't get it anymore.

How can people experience unspeakable things right before our eyes.
The things that horror movies are written about actually happen to people. Because of his mistreatment, he developed dissociative identity disorder. These are depicted in this work, among other things.

Healing is not something you do in a day, a month or in a year. Saying you are a beautiful person and that you are worth it is one thing, but actually believing it is another. This work depicts this struggle.

Inside, I feel rotten. I can't talk about it, as if maggots roll out of my mouth as soon as I open it.
I fight, but am caught in the shackles of my history. Am I worth carrying on? What if things can't get better for me? If all innocence has been taken away from me.

Healing is not done in a day, in a month or in a year. Look until it hurts and don't be unchanged.

There is a whole world of stories beneath the surface of what we see every day. It can happen to anyone. You, your little brother, your best friend, your mother. Even your family  cause you to end up in the circuit. It happens every moment of every day. While reading these sentences, people are in danger, people's lives are destroyed, and people are kept quiet.

There are works of art that we know well that get a lot of attention. However, there are stories that deserve more attention. It can happen to anyone. Even the girl with the pearl. And sometimes a starry night is not so beautiful: sometimes the stars fall and the sky explodes.

JOke Land is an artist who works with a lot of different materials. She is inspired by inner eruptions of feelings or insights or experiences that provoke new beginnings of concepts. She takes it as it comes and expresses it in a direct way on canvas, paper or material, such as wood, wool, and rope or whatever material is at hand that contributes to the expression. She wants to make art that is close to the real world of the senses and close to real people. She is also a psychologist.