This Lady Died Last Night
This Lady Died Last Night is a photographic farewell to the first place
that ever felt like family.
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I made this series inside the central kitchen of Care Home De Vossenberg — the place where I worked as a teenager, where I learned how to exist in the world, and where people liked me long before I understood why. The kitchen was about to close, and this project became a goodbye gift to the staff who raised me into adulthood without ever knowing they were doing it.
These photographs show the everyday world behind institutional doors: the worn kitchen shoes with names scribbled on them, the freezer corridor, the clock that never moved fast enough, plates coming back half-finished, colleagues smoking outside between shifts, the fluorescent light that flattened everything except the people themselves. I wanted to record the things that make a workplace a home — the rituals, jokes, silences, habits, and the strange intimacy of working shoulder-to-shoulder with people who become your life without ever calling it that.
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The title comes from a note taped onto a returned plate:
"Deze mevrouw is overleden vandaag."
A blunt message, handwritten, sitting beside the scraps of a last meal. It captured everything about working in elderly care — the closeness to life, the closeness to death, and how both can coexist in something as ordinary as a dirty plate.
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I spent years here writing poems on the back of menu cards, scribbling stories between shifts, growing up between industrial dishwashers and Christmas decorations taped to a clock. This was my first safe place. My first audience. My first real belonging.
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This Lady Died Last Night is a tribute to them — to the cooks, dishwashers, porters, friends.
To the people who taught me that I didn’t have to shrink myself to fit anywhere.
To the kitchen that shaped me before I knew I would one day look back and call it formative.