Studying Fine Arts at KABK: My Graduation in 2024

In 2024, I graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. My graduation marked the end of an important period of research and experimentation, but it also became a point of departure for the practice I continue to develop today.

My work at the academy was rooted in repetitive processes and textiles, while increasingly moving between textile, drawing and installation. I was interested in the histories embedded within textile practices, particularly the relationship between textiles and women, and in the ways that materials traditionally associated with domestic life could become a language for contemporary artistic investigation.

At the academy, these early experiences became the starting point for a much wider investigation. I began to look at textiles as carriers of knowledge, memory and social expectations. The things I had encountered in my family began to connect with histories of women's labour, mythology, literature and the position of textile-making within Western art history.

Graduating from KABK was therefore not simply about completing a degree. It was an opportunity to understand how a practice that had begun with something intimate and familiar could open onto much larger questions. The textile techniques I had learned from my grandmother became connected to histories that extended far beyond my own family, while remaining grounded in the physical act of making.

The graduation project also helped establish the direction of my work beyond the academy. Since then, my practice has continued to move between textile, drawing and sculpture, allowing different materials and forms of making to exist alongside one another. Textile remains an important point of departure, but I am interested in what happens when it enters a different physical and conceptual space.

Looking back at my time at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, I see the graduation project as a moment in which many of these threads came together. Personal memory, inherited knowledge, research and material experimentation became part of the same practice. What began with learning how to make things by hand became a way of asking what those things can carry, what histories they preserve, and what happens when they are brought into the context of contemporary art.

My graduation from KABK was not a conclusion to that research. It was the beginning of its continuation.