“The dancer shapes my inner landscape, each fragment capturing a piece of my emotional core. Through movement, light, and silence, the unspoken finds its form.”

The Emotive Body

When we look at dance, something stirs within us. A movement can move us, evoke something, or touch a memory for which we have no words. Dance speaks in a language that is nonverbal — a language of muscle, breath, tension, release.
In my work, I collect fragments of movement performed by dancers in improvisation. These are the micro-gestures in which emotion becomes visible — the wordless grammar of the body.

Since 2022, I have been gathering these fragments, initially for my book project Where the Spirit meets the Bone, in which I sought, in a poetic way, to build a bridge between viewer and dancer. My intention was to show that dance is more than performance: it is a way of translating inner experiences into form, of making ourselves understood without language.

In The Emotive Body, I focus even more on this bodily transmission. The images are made in natural daylight, in a space free from the distraction of backgrounds or objects. It is a study of movement — of making visible what usually passes in an instant.
The observations become images. I continually investigate how physicality can offer direct access to emotional experience — not through narrative, but through pure movement.
What remains in a single moment of a body in transition?
What does it reveal, even before it becomes conscious?

Exhibition ‘Inner Movement'‘ De oude Meisjesschool Bovenkarspel 2025