Kimberly Alkemade-Maas
2024 Paralympic Champion in the 200-metre sprint (T64) and initiator of Moving for Growth
Sprint out of the shadows
Elisabeth searched the white canvas
for blooms emerging from the shadows.
Her path becomes a bridge to the formula I know:
Performance = Potential - Noise.
She ignored the noise of her disability
to perform masterfully with her left hand.
My dear husband brought that stillness into our home,
so I could do honour to my potential on the track.
Two world records, gold on the clock,
the spiritual victory I will carry with me always.
But after the finish, the shadow of haste falls:
no rest, no retirement on that golden sea.
You must already know where the future lies,
for the world is already asking and demanding again.
It is that single sprint from the shadows
that brings you, with all your heart, towards the light.
On her canvas, the Echeveria blooms, surviving in shelter,
until, as Grandiflora, it defies the most barren soil.
In silence, she built up her reserves,
as a champion honours her own strength.
The track is empty; the paint has dried:
two worlds connected by one deep breath.
Where the brush moved to the left and the sprint to the right,
in gentle stillness, the true light was sought.
Deborah Lauria
Director of IederIN
What a beautiful watercolour! And painted with the left arm, too.
Is that remarkable? In some ways. Nowadays it’s not unusual to do things with your left hand, but back then it was. In the past, people were forced to become right-handed: being left-handed was simply ‘not accepted’. The maker of this work had no choice, because her right arm had developed only as far as just below the elbow.
The painting is all the more powerful because of this extra dimension: it shows a beautiful exotic flower, and it shows that you can create art with a disability – E.J. Koning won prestigious prizes.
Talent knows no limits, yet people with disabilities rarely receive the same recognition and opportunities as able-bodied people. While we can appreciate nature in all its diversity of forms, colours and textures, we judge people more negatively based on what we perceive as deviation from the norm. The result is often exclusion.
Isn’t our society beautiful precisely because it is so diverse? We flourish when the diversity that makes our society what it is becomes the norm!
Ghizlan El Hachimi
Junior Curator of History
Elisabeth Johanna Koning was born with an underdeveloped right arm, but that did not stop her from drawing with skill and precision. Her drawings of exotic plants reveal the breadth of her outlook. She travelled to world exhibitions in London and Paris, and during her honeymoon in Java she made watercolours of tropical flora, which she gathered into her ‘East Indies portfolio’. This placed her within a broader 19th-century colonial tradition in which art, botanical collections, and colonial expansion were intertwined. Artists from the Netherlands, such as Koning, documented plants and animals in the Dutch East Indies, Surinameand other colonies, and brought their drawings and paintings back to their homeland. These images, along with the exotic plants themselves, subsequently circulated throughout the world. Koning embodies the close interweaving of art, nature and colonialism in the 19th century.
