Artist In Residence/
TIENGEMETEN

Artist In Residence: Tiengemeten - Het Laatste Eiland/Natuurmonumenten

A collaboration between Natuur Monumenten and Het Laatste Eiland, to create a new audience for the island of Tiengemeten, a former agricultural destination turned natural monument.

‘Gulden Kamer’ (‘Golden Room’)

The work I created during the summer of 2018 for Festival Het Laatste Eiland and Natuurmonumenten. I was given the opportunity to work on a cross-over of nature and culture, to create a spatial intervention that connects past and future in a full-on sensory experience. The goal of the organisations was to bring a different crowd to the island of Tiengemeten, with a new way to view history and future of this ‘Last Island’.

The building I got to create an intervention for, was the old Quarantaine. A place where ill-shipmen stayed to either ‘heal or die’ after their overseas travels. The part of the island is called ‘Weemoed’ (Melancholy). Without sadness, it felt like stepping back into the past and reconnecting with my background in the Dutch countryside. The building was turned into a folly by landscape designer Luc Engelhard, giving it back to nature to inhabit, but attaching it’s a sense of history to the landscape.

I focused on the harvest of one herb since it tells many tales. 

Solidago Canadensis, or Goldenrod, is an exotic species, not native to Europe, but thriving in these conditions. It is hugely invasive and unwanted at Tiengemeten. However, there is a beauty in this plant, which I got to share in this work. Both it’s wealth in smell and colour are striking, but it is well known as a medicinal and dye plant.

The first part of the process was harvesting and drying the flowers for weeks, a beautiful mindful way of living with the land, the local flora and fauna, and the weather circumstances. Seeing about 4000 stalks of flowers taking space, shaping the room and creating atmosphere with its perfume, meant that quite organically the idea of building a golden room, architecture from plants, came to mind.

Creating a piece of architecture, cultivating nature again; the belligerent character of the plant translated to a sharp unwelcoming barrier. Once inside, it was an intimate embrace of the honey, meadow and piney scent, with the woolly texture of the dried flowers and wealthily emerged seeds.