Biography

Gaby:  Maaike, your work deals a lot with perception, instability, meaning… where does that start for you?
Maaike: I guess, it starts with not knowing. The first thing I remember is not remembering. As a kid I had epilepsy, so I’d lose consciousness and then come back, up to twenty times a day, not knowing what was happening.

To manage my uncertainty (fear), I had to locate myself again and again in time and space. So I started making things with my hards, out of whatever was there, and I listened to music obsessively to place myself in time.

 

So quite early on I learned that things aren’t as fixed. Not my body. Not memory. Not place. Not even meaning. And yet there was a way to stay grounded in that feeling of not knowing.
 

Gaby:  Feeling grounded is important. But you moved from Netherlands and New Zealand, right? What did that bring you?
Maaike: A sense of distance between contrasts. I think a lot about this concept of Genius Loci. It means 'the spirit of a place'. I think every landscape has its own character, it becomes a kind of parent, rearranging your priorities, values and perceptions. 

I was born in the Netherlands which is partially below sea-level. The environment is controlled, pragmatic, designed. The 'poldermodel' mentality – a cornerstone of our culture – originates from the shared responsibility in managing water and reclaimed land (polders). It's all about agreements, dialogue and practical solutions. Rotterdam, where I am now, is also a result of this thinking. It is complex, reimagined, fluid, collaborative, vibrant and open; everything comes in and passes through. 

 

Aotearoa New Zealand, where I lived for 32 years is isolated, raw, vast, sparsley populated, volcanically alive and tretcherous; the earth literally falls out from under you when there is too much rain, or an earthquake hits. The indigenous Māori have a deeply rooted relationship to land and environment, held and transmitted through tikanga and collective memory. In a landscape shaped by volatility, wind, water, seismic shifts, this relationship is not about control, but about awareness, resilience, and an innate respect for forces that cannot be managed.

I’ve lived both inside and outside these cultures. Displacement does something to you, comparison is inevitable. But I didn't want to choose one place to belong in, I wanted it to choose me. I have found that a sense of 'I' isn’t something fixed inside you. It’s something that forms in relationship to the people around you, the language, the weather and the land.

Gaby:  Language seems to play a big role in your work as well.
Maaike: Yeah… language is... complicated for me.
I lived most of my life in English, and my father forbid us to speak Dutch after we arrived. So I became very aware of gaps — in my vocabulary and my identity. Poetry became a way to both learn a language and express my homesickness; describing contrasts as accurately as I could, as an antidote to judgement. When you look at what escapes translation, you realise language isn’t neutral. Every language carries a worldview.
So I started treating language more like another material element. I use materials to express what language cannot. Something that helps you structure things—but also something that can fail you.
 

Gaby: Is that where asemic writing comes in?
Maaike: Yes, exactly.
Asemic writing looks like language, but you can’t read it.
It sits right on that edge. Its like someone trying to talk through a gag.
It kind of interrupts the automatic response of “I need to understand this.” It slows you down, it alienates you.
For me, it’s not about removing meaning, it’s about loosening it.
Making space for something else to happen.
 

Gaby:  What artist have influenced you and how do they inspire you?
Maaike: I am heavily influenced by the Concrete Poetry movement in general. And by artists like Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. They sit on opposite ends, which I like.

Barbara Kruger is very direct. Her work combines both text and image with a kind of authority that’s hard to ignore. Coming from a graphic design background (like me), she borrows the visual language of advertising and mass media (formats we’re used to trusting) and then turns them back on us. What I find compelling is that she doesn’t open meaning up, she directs it, so it lands with certainty. And that clarity, for me, becomes a useful counterpoint to what destabilises meaning.
 

Cindy Sherman is much more open. She explores identity within a scene. She uses her own body to construct identities that feel familiar, drawn from film, media, cultural archetypes, but never fully real. You recognise the type, but you can’t quite locate the truth of it. Her work exposes identity as something performed, assembled, and mediated. There’s no fixed point, no clear message to land on. Instead, meaning stays in flux. There is a kind of unease created in constantly negotiating what you’re looking at, and what it might say about you as the viewer.

I think I move between those two positions; seeking clarity, but also not wanting to commit to one truth. That tension is very important for me.
 

Also, Robert Rauchenberg! Love his experimental approach, how he lets materials think. His work doesn’t resolve into a single image or message, it holds multiplicity and complexity. There is a kind of permission for materials to be themselves, to let meaning remain unstable, and to allow different visual languages to sit next to each other without forcing coherence.

 

Gaby:  And how does that translate into your work?
Maaike: I work a lot with encaustic, wax and paper, on glass, plaster and metal. Wax is beautiful and interesting because it’s never fully stable. It preserves, blurs details, shines with friction and shifts states. It absorbs light, while somehow also gives it back. Glass reflects, metal resists. Plaster obscures. So the materials aren’t just there to make an image, they are 'being' themselves. Like characters, they carry the idea.

I also layer things with different life spans. Some materials stay, others fade. And over time, the work changes.
 

Gaby:  So the work isn’t fixed?
Maaike: No, and thats more honest I think.

We tend to want beautiful things, artworks, to stay the same–to be permanent, archival. But that doesn’t reflect reality. So I let the work change. Slowly. Over years. Things disappear, but in doing that, they reveal something else. Like faces used to before Botox. 

 

I like to combine opposites; natural materials like beeswax or clay, with manipulated minerals, glass or metal, and even synthetic like perspex or parrafin. And then work with their potential for unification and change. Clay becomes mud and cracks, it boils, dissolves and washes away. Meaning isn’t fixed—it emerges, disappears, comes back differently. 
 

Gaby:  The NZ landscape obviously influenced your material choices. Are you also influenced by Māori philosophy?
Maaike: Yes, very much. The aspects of Tikanga Maori that inspire me most is the humility inherent in Te Ao Māori, coexistant with the raw power and pride in their cultural expression. Māori see themselves as inseparable from the land. I'm inspired by the wairua (spirit) and mana (pride) that drives them to protect tinorangatirantanga (the right to self determination). That is Aroha in action, to me. Love. 

Māori creation stories also shaped how I saw and became myself in the world. How all beautiful things are born from chaos and darkness. Darkness isn’t something to avoid, it’s where things form. That shifts your relationship to uncertainty. 
 

Gaby:  What are you working on at the moment?
Maaike: My project Semantic Meltdown. It looks at material and meaning in this post-truth era. Language (everything) feels unstable now, manipulated, fragmented, precarious. So I treat language like a material. Something you can grasp, shape but that can also collapse.

Gaby: And what do you want people to experience when they see your work?
Maaike: Not a clear message, in contrast to most in my professional creative roles. I want to invite a moment for pause to reflect on how we read the world now, where eveything is in-formation; we create meaning that can't settle for more than a moment. I want to invite people to look again, and think about their looking, instead of making assumptions to avoid inner conflict.

 

Ambiguity is not the enemy. I think it’s a space you can work and play in.
 

Gaby:  And how would you position yourself, as an artist?
Maaike: Somewhere in between things. Between epochs, cultures, languages, between materials, between places.
 

I’m interested in what happens between poles, what holds, what shifts, what falls apart. And how we make sense of that, while we’re inside it.