“This is it”, she thought, looking at Rodin’s works. At the age of nineteen she travelled to Italy to study sculpture at the Florence Academy of Art.
The high points of the history of the art of sculpture can be seen in her works: from the Venus of Milo via Donatello’s Mary Magdalene to The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. But she also takes work by the great painters such as Vincent van Gogh, Lucian Freud and Marlene Dumas and translates them into sculptures. What all these examples from art history have in common with Blokker is a powerful and sensitive oeuvre that captivate and enchant the viewing public. Her work can be found in private collections from Europe to the United States and is regularly featured in international exhibitions.

There is an encounter with an elderly demented lady who is not sure of where she is, a staring boy pressing his hand against a window and a young woman who is lying naked and aggravated on the ground. Lotta about the hour of the wolf: “While you feel lonely during those sleepless hours, you do not realize that you are sharing this sleeplessness with many others. They, too, lie awake in the darkness, anxious or sorrowful
about things that have happened or are about to happen. Or they may be excited and hopeful about what is coming. Whereas daytime provides distraction, the night – agreeably or otherwise – gives the opportunity to retreat into yourself. Your imagination goes on the rampage, ideas bubble up, solutions appear out of nowhere.”
There are no further diversions in the night and feelings can no longer be suppressed. Blokker describes her project as a nocturnal, intimate confrontation with our self: “What I find so attractive in people is their sincere emotion. That is something you feel at night mostly, when people have to fall back upon themselves.” Her bronzes are more than figures of people of flesh and blood. They are symbolic portraits that function as a mirror, so that we can recognize ourselves.

Good care practice will appear to be care that arises from a relationship-based programming. This means that the caregiver programs it on: leaving his or her own professional position, walking (metaphorically) to the place behind the one who is taken care of, joining in, as much as possible, with the perspective of the other person and then walking back to his or her own position in order to develop a substantial idea about good care for this person at this moment at this place. Doing so caregivers get to know the concerns that matter most to care receivers. In that sense the two figures from “It’s a boy” – the one standing behind the other – can be understood as an image of the caregiver who takes up the position and perspective of the care receiver.
Blokker describes a kind of decentralization of the ego during the time that she is dedicated to the practice of sculpting. The contact with her models is important in connection to her work: indeed, as it shows, in trying to capture the soul of the other person. Here we see a certain similarity with the process of care giving.
The epistemological starting point in care ethics, both in practices of care and in carrying out qualitative inquiries, is empirically grounded in the daily lived life of specific and concrete caregivers and care receivers in their context. It is this reality of daily life, the concreteness of vulnerable human beings in the sculptures of Blokker, that appeals to us.
In a care ethical view, care is not only identified with the reduction of vulnerability that is desired. Good care is in itself a realization of acceptance of vulnerability, or contingency, guided by the consciousness that it inevitably goes together with all that makes human life a good or at least livable life.