Softness as a Choice

Soft Key (2025 ) with sewing machine at the background

When I hung my Soft Key on the wall, I recognised a quiet familiarity. The folded textile, the basket-like structure, the soft colours and downward lines recall an older domestic Western world where much of women’s work remained unseen. I don’t want to return to that history, but I also don’t want to erase it. Textiles, like the silk here, are often associated with domestic labour, intimacy, and care. Inspired by the Fibre Arts Take Two course with Tina Marais, I let the material speak for itself in this Key.

Then, to explore how context shifts meaning, I placed my Technical Key beside it — made of metal, rope, hardware and tensioned straps. The contrast is immediate: soft next to hard, domestic next to engineered, round versus straight. Each property of the material becomes clearer in the presence of its neighbour. Context creates meaning.

This work is part of my ongoing Key project. The key form comes from my research into openness and vulnerability — how we open, how we close, and how we protect or expose ourselves in daily life.

The cycle of opening and closing is a recurring theme in many areas of human life. We open when we trust or feel supported; we close when we are ashamed, threatened, overwhelmed or uncertain. This cyclic movement never stops. I work with materials to express these stages — the soft openings, the tight closures, and the shifts in between. This is what the Keys explore: the balance between vulnerability and protection, breath and tension, invitation and boundary.

Almost everything we find worth sharing — our stories, films, and news reports — revolves around openness and vulnerability. I also realised that this cycle reaches deeper than culture or rational thinking. It connects to our oldest instinct: the reptile brain with its basic responses — fight, flight, or freeze. Materials also speak on that level. We perceive softness as safety, hardness as threat, and tension as a state of alertness. These reactions are immediate, physical, and intuitive.

Placed together, the Soft Key and the Technical Key lead to a simple question:

Where are we now? Do we need to close or to open? Do we defend ourselves with hardness and armour, or dare we meet each other with compassion, care and support?

I don’t know the answer. The Keys don’t offer solutions — they only make the question visible.

In mid-December, I will begin installing my exhibition in Warmond, where all the Keys — including the Soft Key and the Technical Key — will be shown together for the first time.

Every material tells its own story, and every viewer hears a different one. That’s the beauty of these Keys: they never reveal the same thing twice. What feels soft to one person may feel exposed to another; what looks protective today might look open tomorrow. Interpretation keeps shifting — just like we do.

If you’re curious to see all the Keys together, you’re warmly invited to the upcoming exhibition in Warmond. I’ll be installing the complete Key series on 17 December, and the opening will take place on Sunday, 21 December at 15:00, at Dorpsstraat 38, 2361 BE Warmond.

Come and see what the Keys whisper to you.