Report by Branko Popovic
The Beginning emerged from a simple yet powerful question: where do you begin when taking a new step? Not by immediately choosing or performing, but first by observing. Since 2021, this layer of meaning has been added to the traditional graduation exhibition, with each year passing the baton to give it fresh expression. This year, the show took place at ENCI in Maastricht from 2 to 5 July 2026, a striking industrial venue on the edge of the city that feels fitting for work that sits at the threshold between study and professional life.
The 2026 edition brought together graduates from various departments, such as Design, iArts, and Communication and Multimedia Design, presenting work that spans materials, methods, and mindsets. What unites them is less a shared aesthetic than a shared impulse: to make work that means something to themselves, to their materials, and to the world around them. Themes of comfort and longing, identity and the body, memory and speculation, slowness and play run through the selection like quiet undercurrents.
Design Department
Jody Peeters — REBIRTH
Jody‘s graduation project bridges the personal and the professional: a practice-based investigation into clothing as a carrier of meaning and personal identity. The garments she designed are made for men active in the cultural sector or sports in Limburg, weaving together her own business, her studies, and her immediate community into a single coherent body of work.
Hendrickje van Dijk — STIL MAAR
Can we hand our grief over to the living landscape? That is the central question of Hendrickje‘s moving project. Looking to nature, trees, grass, birdsong, dry leaves, seeds waiting for warmer times, she creates space to process sorrow. Her accompanying work Tast takes this further with a porcelain cup designed to ease loneliness at the dinner table: a handprint is pressed into the ceramic so that, when filled with warm soup or coffee, holding the cup feels like holding another hand.
Mees Cappers — GELASSENHEIT
Mees explores the boundary where his own actions give way to the autonomy of the object. Through a dialogue of material knowledge, intuitive forming, and constant analysis, he has created a collection of sculptural furniture in steel, wood, and travertine, objects that speak of exceptional craftsmanship and an extraordinary eye for detail.
Annabel van Amersfoort — GROEIPIJN
In uncertain times shaped by social media’s unrealistic ideals, the natural process of growing up feels increasingly difficult. Annabel’s Groeipijn (Growing Pains) investigates that feeling, and asks whether adulthood as a concept actually exists, or whether everyone is simply pretending.
Carlijn van Damme — Binnenste Buitenstebinnen
In a world increasingly oriented toward rationality, control, and functionality, Carlijn‘s work reclaims the intuitive, the illogical, and the playful. The work invites visitors to wander through an in-between space, to let go of what must be logical, and to make room for wonder and imagination.
Chantal van der Slikke — De Kleur van Truzement
Growing up in Retranchement, a village she rarely visits now but which has become an ever-greater source of inspiration, Chantal translates her deep fascination for weaving techniques, hand-dyed yarns, and colour into wordless textile samples. Through prints, transfers, collages, and objects, she assembles a collection of echoes from a world between inside and outside, where fantasy and reality meet and the boundaries between child and adult blur.
Anne Prinz — MONDAY’S CHILD
Anne‘s collection of handbags is born from personal experience with sensitivity, depression, and recovery. The bags function as portable stories, making emotions, memories, and mental processes tangible. From a distance they appear cheerful; up close, they tell stories about depression, therapy, and the complexity of human feeling. Each bag carries a different mental state.
iArts Department
Bente Scheffer — To Be Herd
Bente‘s project follows a year-long deep dive into the world of sheep, exploring how wool intertwines two species in a cyclical relationship. Through questions, facts, and stories gathered over twelve months, the work searches for a way to relate to one of humanity’s oldest companions in our current time.
Sarah Palomares — Expansión Uterina
The result of a year-long graduation research project, Uterine Expansion is a series of handmade textile pieces exploring the uterus as the first territory inhabited by human life — and as a space marked by memories of control, medicalisation, and violence imposed on bodies that carry or have carried life. Through crochet, Sarah reflects on the relationship between body, uterus, maternal lineage, and memory, exploring how the uterus can symbolically and physically extend beyond the body.
Communication and Multimedia Design
Willemijn Hamers — Manus: Stop and Create the Flowers
As digitalisation accelerates, our hands are used differently, many actions become simpler, and fine motor skills are increasingly neglected. Willemijn‘s project invites us to slow down and rediscover what working with our hands can mean.
Thorsten Sassen (Studio Thorie)— Finding Atomia
Thorsten created a speculative installation rooted in a fictional declassified document from 1959. Set in the post-war period of the Atoms for Peace programme, Finding Atomia imagines a nuclear testing site where consumer goods company Multicon attempted to transmute agricultural surpluses into crops that could address scarcity and waste. The installation blurs the line between archive and invention, between historical document and speculative fiction, asking what we project onto the idea of a better future, and what gets buried in the archives.
Photography: Branko Popovic
