A Different Way of Seeing
Sometimes a year changes far more than your skills: it changes the way you see the world.
In 2014, shortly after my mother’s passing, I enrolled in the Orientation Year at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She had always dreamed of attending art school herself. For me, joining the programme became a quiet way of reconnecting with her through something we had never truly shared while she was alive: making.
I didn’t arrive with a clear artistic ambition. I wasn’t looking to become an artist. I was looking for a language I hadn’t found yet.
Every weekend for a year, I found myself surrounded by an extraordinary mix of people. Recent high school graduates worked alongside professionals changing careers, retirees rediscovering creativity, and people from completely different cultural backgrounds. What connected us wasn’t experience, it was curiosity.
Rather than teaching technique, the programme encouraged experimentation. Materials became questions rather than answers. Ordinary objects became opportunities. Every assignment challenged assumptions about what something could be, rather than what it was supposed to be.
One assignment asked us to create a sculpture using an everyday material (as displayed in the header image). I chose aluminium foil because of its remarkable duality. It can be incredibly fragile, light and flexible, yet, when carefully folded and shaped, it becomes surprisingly strong and self-supporting. The same material can form delicate sculptures or robust structures but the outcome depends entirely on how the maker understands and works with it.
One of the projects that still resonates with me today was a wearable sculpture I made from fragments of broken mirror.
The piece explored how our perception of ourselves becomes fragmented when it is constantly shaped by the expectations of others. Social media, magazines and public opinion all become mirrors, yet none of them ever reflect the whole person. Wearing the necklace literally restricted movement, turning an invisible psychological pressure into something physical.
Looking back, I’m struck by how relevant the theme still feels. Even before wellbeing became central to my professional work, I was already interested in the relationship between our environment and our inner world.
Another memorable project emerged almost entirely by chance.
The municipality happened to be pruning trees near the academy, and our class asked whether we could use the discarded trunks, branches and roots. Together we transformed these overlooked materials into a temporary landscape inside the studio: a collective installation assembled from what others considered waste.
It wasn’t about creating individual artworks. It was about observing, collaborating and discovering new possibilities within existing materials (and having great fun whilst doing it).
Although I greatly enjoyed the artistic freedom, the year also helped me understand what kind of creative work suited me best.
I realised I wasn’t primarily interested in creating autonomous art. I was fascinated by design: work that could influence how people experience, use and move through the world. That insight eventually led me towards spatial design, architecture and, years later, workplace wellbeing.
Looking back now, I recognise this year as the beginning of a thread that still runs through everything I do.
Whether designing healthier workplaces, researching how environments influence behaviour, or creating installations that invite reflection, the underlying question has remained remarkably consistent:
How can thoughtfully designed environments change the way people experience their everyday life?