taking • place
HEXAGON Topos (1988) consists of 100 lead rolls placed at equal distances on a spiral line. Beneath this seemingly random pattern lies an underlying order that ensures each roll is in the right place.
In 1997, Lokaal 01 in Breda organised a group exhibition. Each participating artist brought a work that was given the best spot among all the other works in the exhibition space, based on mutual agreement. My contribution to the exhibition was a wooden ball: AT THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD (T.S. Eliot). The ball was unpacked, rolled immediately away from where it was placed, hesitated for a moment, but eventually found its place and came to rest there.
In the Manderheide in north-east Twente, two fields were ploughed in a spiral pattern in the 1930s: the “circles of Jannink”. In the 1990s, I transformed Jannink’s circles into the landscape artwork known as the MANDER CIRCLES, and in the meantime, the MANDER CIRCLES transformed me into a landscape artist.
While Jannink was ploughing his spirals, a seedling sprouted in the heather and juniper thicket between the circles. Now, this juniper is a mature tree. Proud and straight as a natural “obelisk”, it stands in the middle of the path connecting the circles, being one of the striking features of the artwork.
The highly fertile landscape of the Brabantse Biesbosch gradually overgrew the artwork WAXING MOON (2008), until it became almost invisible. The artwork has recently been restored to its original state, but not completely. Time has brought unexpected scenic and ecological qualities, and these are now being given free rein on one half of the site. In fact, the artwork is only now truly “complete”. Landscape art is spatial, but it mainly takes place in “time”.
A work of art is, by definition, a prototype. At PIER+HORIZON, I needed the ‘damage and disgrace’ caused by winter storm Eunice (2022) to recognise that something had to change; it had to be more robust and sustainable. On closer inspection, the solution had already been sketched out in an early draft from 2013. In the summer of 2024, a sustainable and storm-proof version of the artwork was installed: PIER+HORIZON “after the storm”.
If cartographer and fortification engineer Pieter de la Rive had realised his plan for a defence line along the Overijsselse Vecht 300 years ago, we would now have a bastion as a viewpoint at the “Raakpunt-N34” near Hardenberg. But De la Rive never built his line, so there was no bastion at this location either. In 2013, I was able to rectify this omission in one fell swoop with the artwork GEO-METRY, “de la Rive revisited”.
Everything has disappeared from Dom Square in Utrecht: Willibrord’s 10th-century Holy Cross Chapel, six mature plane trees with 2,000 years of archaeological history in their roots, and 14 ornaments from the restored Dom Tower that had been ravaged by test of time. Everything now comes together in the artwork •EX SITU•IN SITU•.
The Dutch landscape is not a blank canvas. As a landscape artist, I am indebted to many generations of planners, engineers, hydraulic engineers, military commanders and farmers who came before me. Through my art, I want to find those hidden stories, translate them into new stories and give them back to the landscape.
The titles are toponyms, they inextricably link the artworks to their place in the landscape.