There are many things that we see more often as an image in our visual culture than we see them in real life. This does not only apply to objects, but also to occurrences. You’ve probably seen a romantic dinner or a funeral many times ‘on screen’ before you experienced it yourself.

Images are mostly idealized or stereotyped versions of reality, but because we see these images over and over again they become familiar and they become archetypes. This is how our visual culture has colored the lenses through which we perceive the world and set the expectations by which we measure reality. The more reality matches these expectations, the more it feels like it’s ‘real’.

With this collection I show how our visual culture works. Therefore I use the stereotype imagery of the ‘authentic Dutch rural life’. I translated the iconic objects (like the yellow raincoat, the blue checkered kitchen towel and the copper kettle) to a collection where logic, realness and function are not important. It is only about the image…

Photo: Dagmar Lindeijer

Hair: Djovrie Krus

Model: Tina de Groot