Halfway through a residency at sundaymorning@ekwc, exhaustion struck. I went back home for a good night’s sleep, but didn’t even have the energy to exchange pleasantries with my wife. In trying to push the limits of my clay, I’d walked right into my own. I wasn’t sure that I was still on the right path, as I strongly believe art is meant to serve life and not the other way round. On the other hand, my exhaustion at least confirmed that I was getting the most out of my residency. Pressing tonnes of clay, firing the ovens to hundreds of degrees, monitoring drying processes 24/7. I’ve driven the physical intensiveness of the ceramic process right into the world-broadening experiences I’ve had during and after my time at Rijksakademie. This resulted in massive clay statues with more colour, layers, and stories than I’d ever used in my sculptures. Maria Schneider, the curator at Museum De Pont, noted that it had curiously made my work lighter, rather than heavier. 

At the behest of Welcome Stranger, I’ve made sculptures around the place where I live during the covid quarantine orders. I scout out the area as I walk around the square without my daily tasks, I stare at the birds, the street furniture, and passersby. Initially, I feel a little lost, but the next thing I feel is the happiness about the fresh perspective on our little square that this project has given me. Until the moment someone notices I haven’t stepped outside to go from A to B, presumably someone who isn’t going from A to B either; my mind is open enough as it is, so I don’t feel like chatting to a drug dealer right now. I rush back to our flat. I recall that I started seeing the breaker panel as a kind of sculpture by the end of a long period of home renovation. The intensive renovation had kept me away from my studio for quite a while, so I think it was that special quality of art that was starting to manifest a new way; the quality that something “can be anything”.

It might seem like the most obvious fact of life, and yet it took my wife and me by surprise when we learned we were expecting. I became a father in early 2021. After a few months of being utterly engrossed in this life change, I crawled back behind my laptop and tried to get to work. My brainstorming was to no avail, I had to get to the baby room, that’s where the new material was waiting for me, I harvested a few used specimens from the nappy bin and stacked them into a kind of miniature sculptural tower. I made a mould of the nappies using lost-wax casting and poured molten aluminium into it, creating a direct copy. I surprised myself in sticking so closely to my ambition to unite the forces of artisthood and fatherhood. 

The frame around the Julian B. Coco record is adorned with traffic lights, a flip-flop, a shoe and a little tin man. This is my visualisation of the lyrics to “Gasolín”. 

Julian B. Coco is my personal link to Curaçao. I’ve wanted to learn more about Coco from the moment my father played one of his songs at my grandmother’s funeral. He told us that Coco delighted in shaking things up musically by mixing different rhythms from all over the world. Coco was a famous guitar player who grew up in Colon, and he and my grandmother were friends. They met when she interviewed him for an article in Guitar, an English-language music magazine. My sister Katrein Breukers and I organized a celebration in remembrance of Coco in 2017. “Tribute to Julian B. Coco” was a total-installation at Hotel Maria Kapel with stories, food, people, and music. During construction, Katrein and a number of women from the Antillean community in Hoorn held a sewing workshop together. At those times, I acted as a babysitter for Jayden, who would tag along with his mother. To Jayden, our exhibition was one giant playground, and he had a lot of fun as a builder. He stuck a print of an article to one of our structures, the one my grandmother had written about Coco, and asked, of his own accord, “who is that man?” It wasn’t until my Curaçao residency years later that I was able to fully look into that question. Visiting his bust in Otrabanda was an emotional moment for me. A few streets from there, I bought a record and a publication of Coco from a thrift shop. At the post office, I laid my hands on some stamps with his likeness on them, and a few days later, I spoke to the designer of the stamps, Avantia Damberg, in her studio. Everyone on the island had known him, it seems – it’s a small world. Still, my stay on Curaçao felt dry and barren. When I talk about the things I’ve learnt there, I often mention the cactus-like survival skills I developed as an artist. Coco’s motto, which adorns the plaque on his bust, is the most fruitful survival strategy: “Sina! Ta bo uniko salbashon”, learning is your only salvation.

Together with students from IBB, I’ve looked for ways to organise our meetings. We opened the discussion of our context by making a huge model of the IBB grounds together. We strove for similarity by using material from the premises, bringing the model to life by adding a few clumps of dried grass. My expectation was that I’d be sharing my expertise in clay with the students. But with the high prices paid for clay imported from the US, it didn’t seem fitting to use this material. Throughout the weeks, our group searched for materials and techniques that could be used on Curaçao. Some of our finds include concrete, soap, and fifty blue ten-metre tubes that were lying somewhere in the field behind IBB. The last workshop week revolved entirely around recycling tin plate.

When we left Curaçao, I made a cake out of tin plate as a surprise for Mr De Palm. In late December, we flew to Bogotá, about a month before this living legend would turn 100. I soldered three tins on top of each other in decreasing sizes, added cut-out candles, and calligraphed his name in metal wire. The flag-like decorations were inspired by Nepomiceno, one of Curaçao’s most well-known naïve artists. Nepomiceno’s work jumped out at me when I visited Landhuis Bloemhof during my first week on the island. It took until after meeting Mr De Palm before I allowed myself to work with tin.

Sandra Lewis from Curaçao Creations made a few phonecalls to Mr De Palm and his daughter to carefully inquire whether his highness was still holding audiences. Her words of praise were enough to net me an official visit. Then, one Sunday morning, I was on my way to the last living member of the “Blekero” tin plate recycling group. He was sitting in front of his house, we greeted each other over the fence. I stopped to admire the tin plate postbox made by the grandmaster himself. We sat in front of the house, Mr De Palm was in a good mood and repeated the same joke about the shape of the island Aruba. I’d brought biscuits to share, but only then realised they might be a bit tough on a near-centenarian set of teeth. One by one, Mr De Palm’s daughter produced his most remarkable creations from somewhere, and his brother extracted more half-broken pieces from a shed. A boat with a cabin door the size of the nail on my little finger, with two tiny hinges and minute little rim so the itty-bitty door would close properly in its frame. We shared stories about our shared love for material and techniques and the joy we got out of creating things. Mr De Palm also attended my closing presentation. He exited the car slowly and with the greatest of care, and made his shuffling way through the exhibition, supported by his daughter and me. For months, I had searched for a connection with Curaçao, its people, and its art. As I held Mr De Palm’s wrinkly hand, I felt it.

A message from me to Bouba Ndiaye; “We really enjoyed meeting your family when we were going around the city for the Dakar Biennial. The rhythms of our lives interlocked thanks to our shared parenthood and artisthood. I’d like those two things to become themes in my work. I think fatherhood and artisthood can provide a lighthearted or serious basis to create new work together or individually. It was a real treat making clay in your studio, and I loved making breakfast in your kitchen. We treat clay and children with care, commitment, love, responsibility, and understanding. It guides our actions, both formal and personal. I think we could gain a lot of insight that might contribute to actualising the field of art.”

Two years later, in May 2024, my family is staying with Bouba’s family once again and we arrange an exhibition together at the Dutch Embassy in Dakar about the theme of parenthood. One of my works on display has lyrics from a tearjerker song by Dutch singer André Hazes, “when you see a child smile, that’s when you feel alive”, with my version written below: “when you see the clay crack, that’s when you feel alive”. From my studio overlooking André Hazes’s statue, I write these last words explaining my work.