Travelling Souls arose from the desire for an all-including colourful herd.
All-including meaning a variety of colours, shapes, symbolism and materials. Herd meaning a flock of animals, or animal-like figures with.. carts? Riders? I didn’t know. So,initially, the herd was mainly variegated and outrageous, not so much ‘travelling from the soul’. But I knew I wanted to take a special trip. Through an emptiness. With a multicoloured caravan. Only after turning over the at that point 12 filled moving boxes (labeled 'Coloured Herd') did the distilling and further specification of the idea begin. I removed action figures, rainbow dinosaurs, and disco balls from my starting collection and continued with a more focused collection.

Especially the collected monkeys caught my attention. There was something about their facial expressions and attitude in general that intrigued me. Somehow dignified and innocent at the same time. Somehow ‘essential’. Why did I choose those specific animals? I wondered. I didn’t even like monkeys.. I photographed them in close-up and started randomly leafing through some various picture books looking for a match. I came across itinerant people, vagrants, beggars, searched further for beggars and found an old print by Lucas van Leyden: “Uilenspiegel: the beggar family,” (1520) owned by the Rijksmuseum.
The wretched poverty did not immediately appeal to me, but there, at the bottom of the print, not large but at the front, with a curved stick nonchalantly used as a walking staff, went a boy, still a child, with a small owl on his shoulder. That was my monkey. Not the owl but the child. Innocent, utterly resigned to the endless walk that was his life, and dignified. Very dignified. Bright and upright. A mature wisdom in the eyes. A soul.
That was right. The theme was right. But a caravan of souls?

I continued and kept my eyes open. Stumbled across a used book that I took home; "Toys for the Souls", 1979 It is the account of the anthropologist Reimar Schefold, who spent two years staying with the Sakuddei, a tribe nation living on one of the Mentawai Islands, about a hundred km out off the coast of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean.
'Take care of your soul', is the motto, and the way of life of these people. “Take good care of her, make it attractive to stay with you or she will run off.”
Flowers, woodcarvings, dancing, singing, and taking your time... They were just a handful of the many things that were recommended in making life more colourful and interesting.

Another book that caught my attention was The Dancing Demons of Mongolia, 1999 It is a catalog published on the occasion of an exhibition with the same name, in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. In multicoloured images and large pieces of text, the history and meaning of the so-called Tsam dancing is explained by J. Fontein.
Here I learned of the shaman ways of life for the first time, dancing among others in the colourful parade that shows in its narrative symbolism the presence of a deity on earth.
I read about the sacred ceremony with its many rituals and masks. I understood that the eyes of the masks were not pierced through due to the supposed presence of a spiritual deity, and I read about the Rulers of the Corpse Field guarding the festival grounds; a function that was reserved to shamans or monks.

I saw my motley herd pass by again, ridden now by shamans, represented by the apes in their pure sincerity, and courage. I thought about the real meaning of seeing, sensing and travelling, and wondered about the presence of the soul in eyes. I read on about the soul and tried to depict intuition in blind faith, I went sanding horses' eyes and wondered who was guiding whom. Just like I let myself be guided by the material and what I did. Was I guided by a blind feeling; it was allright. At the same time I found out why I tend to work with animals as riders, of other animals? I watched a movie I normally wouldn't choose; 'The planet of the apes', and found my answer there. 

The collection I built for this project is the largest for me so far. It consists of camels, horses, oxen, and especially many apes as riders. I collected many small objects and pieces of material; beads, feathers, pieces of rope, pieces of fur, textiles and leather. I boiled a chicken carcass and dried it, to make beads of the bones.

I wanted to take a special trip. Through the void. With a multicoloured caravan. 
And started that journey.