To Your Knees
2026
Exhibited at Kazerne
Dutch Design Week 2026
The diary as feminine archive
Awareness of mortality produces a desire for legacy, for something that outlasts a life. While finitude is universal, the production of legacy is shaped by social, cultural, and institutional structures and access to historical records has long been unevenly distributed - resulting in women’s contributions to have frequently been left out of dominant narratives.
To Your Knees uses darkness as a metaphor for that historical obscurity and the condition in which feminine visibility, authorship and recognition were withheld.
The project draws on Victorian diary-writing habits where the diary served as more than a domestic habit. Hidden from public scrutiny and performed in the dark, it was a territory for young women to begin experimenting with voice and selfhood, a refuge from expectation, and a private archive through which one could assert her own continuity. These records shaped early forms of feminine authorship, and they remain our clearest access to victorian women’s lived experiences.
Awareness of mortality produces a desire for legacy, for something that outlasts a life. While finitude is universal, the production of legacy is shaped by social, cultural, and institutional structures and access to historical records has long been unevenly distributed - resulting in women’s contributions to have frequently been left out of dominant narratives.
To Your Knees uses darkness as a metaphor for that historical obscurity and the condition in which feminine visibility, authorship and recognition were withheld.
The project draws on Victorian diary-writing habits where the diary served as more than a domestic habit. Hidden from public scrutiny and performed in the dark, it was a territory for young women to begin experimenting with voice and selfhood, a refuge from expectation, and a private archive through which one could assert her own continuity. These records shaped early forms of feminine authorship, and they remain our clearest access to victorian women’s lived experiences.
Reherasal in the dark
To Your Knees manifests the importance of these unofficial archives through a writing desk, reclaiming darkness not as solely a site of fear but as a space in which selfhood may be rehearsed, recorded, and preserved.
Through the so-called ‘childish’ fear of the dark, it illustrate early feminine finitude and what it entails as one move from childhood towards adult life. Emerging from a loss of visibility, control, and certainty, the fear does not simply disappear but persists, transforming over time and becoming increasingly embodied, socialised, and continuous.
Reappropriating Victorian dollhouses - through which girls once rehearsed domestic life in miniature - To Your Knees uses it as a façade where the rehearsal of domestic life is kept as a disguise for the writing desk behind it.
To reach the writing surface, the user must kneel before a form built at an inadequate scale for the adult body unveiling what the diary once required: writing performed out of sight, at an hour the day does not account for, and the disguise being a condition of use.
Between the girl arranging a house in miniature to the woman writing herself into an archive, the diary marks the passage from childhood to the socialised woman: the point at which play gives way to the knowledge that a life is finite and must be recorded to remain.