Artist’s note

‘In the concert of life, no one gets a program’ is an old 19th-century Dutch proverb that was painted on a tile hanging in my aunt's kitchen. As a kid, I would read it when we visited and appreciate the somewhat lighthearted perspective on life it offered. Well, relatively lighthearted anyway, in contrast to the more ominous ‘God sees you,’ which decorated the walls of some of my more somber and serious parents’ friends’ houses.

My aunt was indeed a lighthearted and friendly woman who treated me as if I were one of her own kids during the few occasions I stayed at her house for a few days. She would let me sit on her lap in the car and stir the car on quiet roads when I was 10 and bought me new clothes, whereas I was used to getting hand me downs from my older brother. She was a dog breeder and lived in the countryside in a house surrounded by dog kennels, with a large yard that even had a sizable swimming pool—which seemed extravagant to me given the Dutch climate but also exemplified her free spirit. She had lived in France for a few years in the early days of her marriage, which was an exceptional thing to do in our extended family. All thirteen siblings in my mother’s family lived in a few neighboring villages and met on Sundays in church and for coffee afterward.

I found the notion of living abroad immensely intriguing. I imagined she must have had a pool there, and that when her husband decided to return to Holland, she only agreed if they could have another pool in the garden. This was entirely my imagination, as I never found out why they had come back or what the circumstances were. My mother summarized the whole venture as, ‘It was a disaster, and they were very unhappy there.’ She would say this with some sort of underlying gratification, as if to suggest, ‘What were they thinking anyway, living in another country?’

It was quite a shock when my aunt discovered, at a relatively young age, that she had breast cancer, and she passed away not long after. I must have been about 12 years old. I remember her telling me quite casually that a lump had been found, shrugging her shoulders and smiling, which made me think it wasn’t all that serious. But in the concert of life, no one gets a program.

I initially wanted to name the sculpture ‘Three Imaginary Boys.’ Not because of the rather fabulous album by The Cure, but in dedication to Lenny, Harry, and Morrison. They were born as triplets, three months too soon, and lived very short lives, most of it spent in a Bangkok hospital, particularly the latter two. Lenny held out the longest, but the trauma of his premature birth led to a premature death after five years. Those years were full of dedication and care by many—first and foremost their parents, who had imagined and hoped for something else, of course, but who dealt with it in ways that are unimaginable.

One of the realizations in all this, for me anyway, is that there is no program. No meaning. No preordained destiny. Life is basically about how you deal with what it throws at you, both the good and the bad. You don’t write the program; you are the program.

Meander, therefore, as your life will do the same.