My grandmother's table

I spent last Tuesday night first planning to chizzle a text into my grandmother’s table and then painting it instead. The idea was to use the table in my installation in the exhibition Wanderlust as a carrier for the small balls I had collected during a 96 day walk from Amsterdam to Hohe Wand in Austria during which every day I collected everything I could tie together and formed small globes, spheres, ramblers' rosaries. Every ball being a representation of the road on that day, every line a piece of the road, every knot an encounter with a stranger. 

I thought it would be a good idea to place them on the table my grandmother had used during a life in which there had been no time to travel, giving birth to 14 and raising 12 children. In my childhood I sat or played around this table every Sunday, holiday and many other days, together with all my aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews. Now that the table is mine, it is so much smaller than it is in my memories.

I didn’t know it was my grandmother’s last night. She died the day after.

I took the table to De Hallen in Haarlem, it was the first time the table that used to be the centre of her house and became mine after she moved to a home for the elderly, was outside a family setting.
In the end I decided not to use it. I took it home, where it belongs.