Blue and white became a central trope of Westerhof’s art precisely because of its association with Dutch’s culture and history and in relation to her experience of migrating to London and setting up a multi-cultural family (Westerhof’s husband is second generation West Indian of Jamaican heritage). In the current era of resurgent nationalism, which implies the containment and ossification of cultures and national identities – as in the colours on national flags – did she identify with the ‘typical’ blue and white marker of Dutch personhood?
Perhaps her answer is in the craft-based nature of her art. Feminist art historians have argued that cratt art, with its strong roots in popular culture, domesticity, and reproductive labour, is the marker of a certain female approach to art ‘making’, emphasising maintenance and care above production, and with a critical distance towards the kind of authorship and market economies associated with (male) high art.
That craft art, especially from the global south is playing an increasingly central role in museum displays and international art fairs across the globe? indicates a generalised exhaustion of the western Romantic aesthetic paradigm of art as beauty and it refocusing towards the more democratic notion of culture.
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