‘Trembling Sunshine’ is a collection of newspaper puzzles, filled in by my mother Rixt Weenink-Klaversma (Hengelo, 1944) who suffers an essential tremor. Most of the puzzles are collected in Spring 2024 when my father was about to die in hospital. According to a schedule my siblings and I stayed over at the apartment of my parents in Eindhoven to help and support my mother and to visit my father, to witness his life and death. In between hospital visits I saw my mother bending over a puzzle, trying to fill in the words and pass the time until the next visit. I acknowledged the struggle and severe restrictions here trembling (close to spastic) hands mean for her, at the same time I admired the beauty of the signs, written by her, unwilling to adapt to the given squares of a puzzle. 3 puzzles were framed and shown at ‘Archipelago – Various modes of resisting the Groove’, a groupshow organized by 004Collective for Het Archief Rotterdam, summer 2024. With ‘Trembling Sunshine’ I also tried to connect an insight from Daily Practice, which is described below.

Excerpt (pp 58-59) from ‘Love is a Daily Practice’ a conversation between Suzanne Weenink and Rosa de Graaf in kunstlicht ‘Labor of Love’ 4-2022 VOLUME – written by Rosa de Graaf

SW
“To me it represents the ideal outcome of daily practice, love, and compassion, too, because maybe love and compassion are the same… that could be. A beautiful example of this is the project and exhibition with Flora [Valeska Woudstra] called Grief is a Daily Practice. This image from that project is another one of the items I selected (Ill. 9). I remember urging Flora to make work in time for Christmas, and she told me I needed to have patience, that, “I have something in mind and you are going too fast.” She proposed instead that she and I carry out some rituals together here in the space. She said she wanted us to sit in silence opposite each other, each carrying our own grief, and that she’d prepared something.
I’m used to meditation but didn’t know what to expect. She lit a candle and said we would carry out a grief ritual. She poured some tea and we just sat. I felt a bit scared, because it’s all about trust, and it’s also very intimate, and how to do this with a person I didn’t really know? We had tea and I thought of my mum. She has a strong tremor, so she has to be fed with a spoon. I feel the tremor also inside me, and I’m scared of it becoming stronger, especially in my hands, but I have it in my speech too sometimes. During the ritual, Flora was tearing up some sheets of paper to write words on, and she wrote
“Daughter.” I wrote “Tremor” and “Mother” on the same piece of paper and placed it above “Daughter”. We sat there with these words, which I was connecting to weakness and my health scares, as well as to social situations—the fear I’d tremble and be unable to lift a teacup. Then suddenly, I looked down and saw the sun coming in.
The tree in front of the building meant the light was dappled—the leaves were trembling. I found it so beautiful. I thought, “Oh yeah, it’s always beautiful when this trembling light comes in.” Together with
the words on the table, this created a deep insight: “Why do I judge one kind of trembling and admire another? If trembling leaves are so beautiful, why isn’t the vulnerability of a trembling person also beautiful? Why is that considered weak? Or, why should I condemn it?” That ritual really helped me look at my health, myself, and my mother in another way. Now, when I meet my mother and see her trembling, I also see the trembling sunlight and feel a lot of compassion.”