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Background: Since 2016, my work as writer and artist, has explored the intersection of art, care, language and medical institutions. In 2018 I was the artist-in-residence at the psychiatric department of the Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, resulting in the book Stories from Kings County Hospital (2019) and Sandplay (2021 – ongoing), a collaborative installation based on Dora Kalff’s 1950s therapy explored what happens when care takes shape without words—when healing becomes visual, tactile, collective.

Objectives & Methods: Living and working between spoken and sign languages as a hard-of-hearing/Deaf artist and writer, I approach care through a sensory vocabulary privileging touch, rhythm, and spatial awareness over speech. This embodied perspective informs how care is sensed, enacted, and represented in collective practices.

In 2025, I curated Beyond the Nuclear Family at Academic Medical Centre UMC in Amsterdam (the hospital houses the Netherlands’ largest private art collection). An exhibition about the hospital as a museum of life - about all the care we receive between birthing and dying.

The exhibition launched a months-long interdisciplinary research journey by horse-drawn wagon, retracing the 1972s feminist activistgroup Dolle Mina route across the Netherlands. Through performances, lectures, workshops, and collectivity at cultural institutions nationwide, the project questioned carework beyond the privatization of the household and family.

Results & Conclusion: In my practice based research I found that healing environments must cultivate awareness of care’s social and political dimensions, creating spaces that foster connection, reflection, and imaginative possibilities rather than reproducing aesthetic comfort.