ROCKY ROADS
Add depth to your and your team’s Christmases

Add depth to your and your team’s Christmases

Are you looking for a unique Christmas gift or do you want to make the holidays of those around you a little more profound? Rocky roads is an artistic translation of the disease process of the two sisters Florine and Juliët; it contains 53 combinations of paintings and poems that portray how the two sisters took ownership of their own lives. 

About the authors and the book Rocky roads

In March of 2018, Flo was diagnosed with cancer. This diagnosis did not only turn Flo’s, but the entire family’s life upside down. We were brought together more closely and started communicating more about what was really going on. For Flo, this diagnosis also helped her to see how stuck she had been in feeling depressed. Through our mom, we were introduced to a whole other way of processing such challenges: to grow and change through, amongst others, meditation. Flo dove head-first into these tools and started this journey, letting go of the ideas she had about herself.

The whole family joined in this journey, each in their own way. We all saw how much of our mental and emotional well-being influenced our physical state. This was becoming very clear for mostly Flo after getting less and less affected by the side effects of therapies in the hospital. All of us faced many of the same fears in different ways and got challenges that caused us to grow a lot in a short time.

After 1,5 years of having cancer, in September of 2019, Flo heard she got healed. The same day, Jules heard she had Lyme’s disease. For her, this was a way of her body telling her how she had been giving so much of her energy to other people, especially in the process of Flo being sick. In the year that followed, Jules went into a similar process Flo went through. She learned to work together with her body, listening to it instead of fighting it.

Both of us found out how we loved expressing ourselves through art. Jules started writing to process the challenges she faced while being sick. Flo grew a lot in the way she was making, and relating to, art.

We decided that we wanted to share how we went from de-pression (depressing ourselves and our emotions) to ex-pression (expressing ourselves and our emotions) and with that idea the basis of the book was created. Flo made the illustrations based on the feeling of the poems. This was another way of seeing how many similarities two different journeys can contain. After a few months, Jules finished the 53 poems that the book contains. In the year after that moment, Flo made the 51 illustrations using mixed media. Each poem and illustration expresses a different part in the process, and describes the parts that we were depressing, the parts we were able to embrace, as well as the parts where we truly felt like we could express ourselves completely.

In addition to the poems and illustrations, we share our moment of diagnosis, and what storms we encountered through stories. As our sub-title, the journey from living on the edge to the center of life, describes, we started a journey. In the book, we describe what ‘living on the edge’ and ‘the center of life’ means for us by writing about our experiences on how we relate to these subjects. 

Start the conversation

With great excitement, Florine and Juliët are offering inspiration sessions for companies. They would love to start the conversation with you and your team about their journey and how they took accountability of their own processes and, ultimately, their own life. As young artists, they engage you into their conversations about their work and the meaning behind the colors, words, and forms.

Yes! I would like to start the conversation!

We are really excited as well, amazing! We will visit your organization on the day and at the time of your choosing and organize a 60-minute inspiration session for you and your team/employees. We will briefly introduce ourselves before getting to the exciting part: defining what “living on the edge” and “the center of life” mean to each of us. What did the “depressing,” “embracing,” and “expressing” parts of our disease process feel like for us? We will read some poems and exhibit the artwork as well as discuss how we turned our processes into art. We will leave room for questions because it is not only about our journey.

We offer two options:

  • With the purchase of 30 books or more, the inspiration session is our treat!
  • If you would prefer to reserve the session separately, we ask an exchange of €350 (incl taxes).

For both options, we can bring separate books, art prints and postcards for on-site purchase as well.

Contact us through the contact form below, and we will give you a call so we can discuss the date and time, as well as your preferences for the session!

We will call you at this number to discuss the details of our session.
We will use this email to confirm your request and the further discussed details.