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I’m on a plane, reading a book on user experience.

The guys behind me are drinking Jack and Cokes.

Their mate, who is originally sitting somewhere in the back,

sits down in the aisle next to me and tells them:

Five pints are the key to flying.

My Boss

2026

157 x 120 x 17 cm

Wood leftovers, used fluorescent light covers, plastic strapping, plastic glasses.

My Assistant

2026

160 x 160 x 25 cm

Wood leftovers, used fluorescent light covers, plastic strapping, metal, cardboard tubes

The Garden Has an Opinion (Bullseye-Rose-Rosette)

2026

202 x 202 x 20 cm

Corporate printed fabric artwork, wood, paper, patches, plastic, paint

In February 2026, I helped architect John Frazer document and archive his work at his property in the Cairngorms. In the barn where he keeps the larger models, he also keeps all of his archery equipment. So, between the images I took for him, I also have images of what I later found out are called archery bosses. My Boss is my version of an archery boss. The original object is made from a stack of foam sheets and a wooden frame tightly packed by plastic strapping. The archer can hang sheets of paper targets to the boss, and the arrow won’t fly out the other side.

In Dutch, there is no word for an archery boss; Dutch archer’s call it: foam target (foamdoel). These words don’t describe the right use since an archery boss sits behind a target. To me, the Dutch word that would represent an archery boss the best way is the word vault (bock), like the gymnastics object. I’m specifically thinking of the stackable wooden vaults used in primary school gym class.  In this case, the other meaning of the word vault in English: a Vault or safe being something that holds important and valuable items, only accessible to a select few. The English word boss (baas) comes from the Dutch word. Where did the boss come from in case of archery boss? More likely from emboss (reliëfdruk), which means to boat into a raised ornament, a word more used in bookbinding.

The combination of all of this made me think about labour structures and ownership when studying this object in the barn. Earlier that winter I had found a collection of three different kinds of used fluorescent light covers, all with different discolourations and signs of use. When I came back, I saw the rectangular light covers and immediately saw how they could be used for My Boss. These specific light covers remind one of a well-lit factory floor.

My Assistant is a response to My Boss.  Asking, what would the assistant of the (archery) boss look like? A stereotype about assistants that I wanted to use for this work is the idea that someone is overworked: doing many jobs at once. I like the word overworked since it’s a word painters use to describe when a painting has been pushed past its finished, “perfect” state and entered into some sort of overwhelmed and overdone state. I made the work feel a bit like that, trying too hard and doing too much.

Other archery terms have funny translations when translated literally back to English: bullseye is roos (rose), target is aimwhite, aimdisk or maybe chuckpoint (doelwit, schietschrijf, and maybe mikpunt). The work The garden has an opinion was made with the first of these two in mind. (Not part of degree show and not shown on this page.) A large rosette made from recycled office decoration; printed photos of symetric well kept french victorian gardens. This rosette is based on a suffragette protest badge used to protest the right to vote. Decoration had something to say.

ClassPass is Evil

2026

160 x 17 x 20 cm

Yoga mat, fluorescent light cover, metal bracket, aluminium

ClassPass is Evil, a wall-mounted yoga mat behind a rectangular curved fluorescent light cover. Preprinted onto the mat are two-dimensional women in yoga poses; the rippled glass activates the women and creates movement while the viewer walks past.  Look behind the plastic cover, the women become flat, and the used quality of the mat becomes visible. With this work and its materials, I’m attempting to talk about both the commodification of fitness classes and the objectification of the body.

Pointers

2026

4x: 385 x 45 x 55 cm

MDF, found shop signage, house paint, paper, foam board, table legs

Pointers connect directly with the history of greater Glasgow and with the history of women’s labour in the 20th century. These are life-size copies of the minute hands from the old Singer factory in Clydebank.  The now-demolished Singer sewing machine factory in Clydebank had a huge clock tower seen from miles away by people all over the town. The clock was how the workers living in the community knew they had to go to work. At the end of the last century, the factory closed, and the tower was taken down. The now-redundant employees missed the clock after it was demolished. To me, it’s beautiful and sad how this object held the daily lives of these working people, and how, when it was gone (as well as the shipbuilding factory), Clydebank changed.  Why only make the minute hands? I found an image from the 1920s; six women labourers hold up the replacement minute hand in the yard of the Singer factory. Around this time, the design of the clock was being changed.  These girls look my own age, and this made me wonder what their and their other not photographed female colleagues’ status was at that time. In a book about the Singer strike in 1911, I found that Singer employed half of the women in Greater Glasgow working outside the home in the 1910s, but women labourers were excluded from the higher-paying, more challenging and therefore more interesting jobs. 1

The material I used for the work tells an additional story. The materials are my connection to my life, my routine and my landmarks in Glasgow. Two of the four hands are made from shop signage I found down my street in Glasgow Southside; a builder’s office was being turned into a flat; the hand-painted sign was hiding under a more modern plastic one. An important detail of these two signs is that, as all four are modular, the text is cut into pieces, causing the text to become illegible. The text becomes a pattern instead; The work can be seen as a whole object first rather than reading the text first; the original mark-making by the sign painter becomes the focus, rather than the builder’s company name.

The third hand is covered in +- 250 images from my working process and images taken outside during the last year. This clockhand is slightly chaotic; the images pasted, layered, ripped and sanded. The images were printed on a printer inside a commercial student accommodation that had a very broken but free printer that added green and orange stripes and tint to every print. The idea of making a new image/collage of many images comes from information on datasets used by AI models; can I make and exhaust my own dataset? Playing with the line between good or bad image, the result and overworked and confused image.

“Pattern exhaustion is a term from anthropology, of when there is an artistic decline in cultures that reuse pottery patterns rather than diversifying. … In the field of AI, pattern exhaustion occurs in the form of model collapse when AI models are trained on data from other models, making the generated content more uniform.”2

The fourth hand is made from plastic foam board, also a sign, this one from the Glasgow School of Art Stow Building, where my Master of Fine Art studio was located. It came down in a storm; the wooden board to which it was attached was rotten through. This one is floppy and weak in materiality, making it curved and fall forward.

Pointers is the literal translation of the Dutch word for clock hands (Wijzers).

1. Ballantine, Ishbel, ed. The Singer Strike Clydebank, 1911: Prepared for the Glasgow Labour History Workshop. Clydebank District Library, 1989.

2. Goeting, Marijke, and Maaike van Neck, eds. Algorithmic Imaginations: Critical Reflections on AI in Art and Design Practice. ArtEZ Academia, volume 42. ArtEZ Press, 2025.

I’m not a ruler, but I rule

I am centimetres