Born in 1962 in Apeldoorn, Jimmy’s life was fractured at age two when he was removed from his family. In the isolation of a children’s home, he was forced into a "peer-oriented attachment"—a profound, horizontal survival bond with fellow children that became the blueprint for his existence and his current collaboration with his co-identities.From age four, this early displacement was followed by 13 years of systemic, sadistic abuse and dehumanization within a specially selected fundamentalist foster family.
Subjected to years of gender-based torture and sensory deprivation, Jimmy’s psyche fractured by age ten. He tried to escape at age sixteen but failed without any contact in the outside world. He survived by retreating into an inner world, though the state system repeatedly failed him, leading to periods of homelessness, a life in solitude in the forest and deep psychological scarring. The extreme gender-related violence during his primary school years has caused him permanent physical injury. Meanwhile, the youth care organization was fully aware of all the systemic abuse and torture during his childhood in foster care but never acted.
1986 – 2019: Survival and the Cycle of Creation
Art became Jimmy’s lifeline in 1992. Placed outside the protection and acceptance of LGBT and rejected in mental health care due to the complexity of his experiences, Jimmy turned to creativity to process, explore and communicate.
His work has always been a raw response to injustice, from the trauma of his foster mother receiving a Royal Decoration despite her crimes, to his own survival of extreme police violence as a low point of the complex aftermath of a childhood in state care.
Triggered by the James Bulger murder case in 1993, his artistic path is marked by a cycle of intense creation and destruction; Jimmy destroyed massive collections of oil paintings and intricate glass mosaics when they became too reflective of his internal "sharpness." These acts of destruction were necessary steps in his search for a safe visual language.
Between 1999 and 2004 Jimmy managed to work as a volunteer in archaeology and archaeobotany which marked an intermezzo in his creative period. He returned to the creative path in 2004, making nature art, followed by weaving, woodworking, making of 3D objects, 4D projections and glass mosaic sculptures. From this period only a few items, several concepts and booklets survived. Time and again, Jimmy attempted to capture beautiful images of landscapes, but every time the inner images of the violence from his youth returned to be expressed.
2019 – Present: Restoration and the Plural Studio
Jimmy operates his "Identity Restoration Studio," where his work is a direct collaboration with his co-identities, Tim and Alex. As equal identities who share the developmental age of three—rooted in that original peer-oriented attachment—they create together to reclaim a stolen past. Their work reflects their shared inner identity, rebuilt from the past: Jimmy identifies radical queer as a group of toddlers and two boys of about 8 and 11 years old. Besides of this work he made landscapes, watercolor drawings on the Arab world and a series of drawings of leaves in ink and pastel.
A landmark lecture at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (2022) served as his "coming out" as a plural identity, living with the label 'Dissociative Identity Disorder'. Central to his current work is the reclamation of Boygender: choosing to inhabit and reclaim his birth gender not as a masculine adult, but as the boy he was never permitted to be.
Alongside Tim, Alex, and the young Sven, Jimmy continues to develop an integrated visual language—a multimedia exploration of what it means to survive, to belong, and to finally be seen.
Notes:[1]
[1] Peer-Oriented Attachment:
A fundamental, survival-based bonding process that occurs when a child is systematically deprived of safe adult caregivers. Rather than a "disorder," this horizontal bond is a sane and healthy human response to an inhumane situation. It creates a lifelong "blueprint" for belonging with others who shared the same isolation. In Jimmy’s art, this manifests as a near-indestructible connection to his peers expressed in co-identities, anchored in their shared developmental age rather than biological age.
[2] Boygender:
Boygender is a gender identity where an individual identifies with the term "boy" but rejects the term "man" or the concept of manhood. It is frequently described as a form of non-binary masculinity that focuses on boyhood, youthfulness, innocence, or soft masculinity. Jimmy uses the gender to reclaim his original gender of birth, which he never experienced during his childhood.
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