BA Photography Graduation Project. 

The garden is not far from my home. It is green and colorful, enclosed by tall hedges of yew and hornbeam. The garden is enormous, but its clever design with many different garden rooms makes it feel cozy and intimate. There’s a pond with waterlilies, a greenhouse, a flower covered hill, a vegetable plot, a shed with tools and a cat, a little forest, a maze, an orchard and much more. No place is better for playing hide and seek, for casual strolls, for contemplation.

Gardening and photography go very well together. In essence, the two are surprisingly similar. Both the gardener and the photographer slide along the same scale of control, with observation on one end and intervention on the other. Both construct new realities – paradises or utopias if you will – the gardener using landscape and the photographer using images.

Pleasant Place is the English translation of Locus Amoenus: a literary concept describing an idealized natural retreat inspired by the Garden of Eden and Elysium. This remote garden hide-out functions as a landscape of the mind, serves to highlight the difference between urban and rural life and is a place of refuge from the processes of time and mortality. Welcome to my pleasant place.

A series about the waterschappen – local institutions that manage water secrity in The Netherlands – for Driessen group. 

Pleasant Place is a growing collection of publications about the art of gardening. Pleasant Place informs and inspires by offering both practical and in-depth information as well as unexpected approaches to everyday garden tasks and garden design. Through collaborations with experts and artists Pleasant Place caters both to those who grow gardens as well as those who imagine gardens.

The Pleasant Place publication series is a spin off of my graduation project, developed and created in collaboration with Floor Kortman and Guus Kaandorp. 

The design is taken care of by Miquel Hervas Gômez and Cesar Rogers from fanfare, and distribution by Jesse Presse (NL/BE), Antenne Books (UK) and Idea Books (all other). 
The first two issues, 1. Enclosures and 2. Nasturtiums (Tropeaolum majus), were launched in October 2022 and are available online and in (book)shops all over the world.

Pleasant Place is kindly supported by Mondriaan Fonds. 

with Guus Kaandorp

 Still life experiments

Nederland beschermt de natuur kapot by Thomas Oudman

Find the online article here :)

Graphic design by Guus Kaandorp

Shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award '22

24cm x 32,5cm 
71 pages
digital print
hardcover
edition of 50

SOLD OUT

– Project description – 
The garden is not far from my home. It is green and colorful, enclosed by tall hedges of yew and hornbeam. The garden is enormous, but it’s clever design with many different garden rooms makes it feel cozy and intimate. There’s a pond with water lilies, a greenhouse, a flower covered hill, a vegetable plot, a shed with tools and a cat, a little forest, a maze, an orchard and much more. No place is better for playing hide and seek, for casual strolls, for contemplation.

Gardening and photography go very well together. In essence, the two are surprisingly similar. Both the gardener and the photographer slide along the same scale of control, with observation on one end and intervention on the other. Both construct new realities – paradises or utopias if you will – the gardener using landscape and the photographer using images.

Pleasant Place is the English translation of Locus Amoenus: a literary concept describing an idealized natural retreat inspired by the Garden of Eden and Elysium. This remote garden hide-out functions as a landscape of the mind, serves to highlight the difference between urban and rural life and is a place of refuge from the processes of time and mortality. Welcome to my pleasant place.

20 x 25cm
Edition of 50
Digital print on art paper
Custom made passe partout
Mahogany frame

Reach out for more information on pricing and shipping:)

BA Photography thesis

Graphic design by Eva van Bemmelen
Edition of 35
SOLD OUT

– Abstract –

As the title suggests, this thesis is about gardens. It is about different kinds of gardens: physical gardens, gardens in visual arts and imaginary gardens.

My research started in the summer of 2020 when I read the following quote in The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World by psychiatrist Sue Stuart-Smith: “All gardens exist on two levels: on the one hand there’s the real, physical garden and on the other there’s the garden of our imagination.”[1]  I am fascinated by both gardens ­– the physical as well as the imaginary – and explore my relationship to both in this thesis.

I have divided my research and this text into two autonomous parts – simply called Part One and Part Two – because of the different natures of my research. The first part is more dry, factual and informative while the latter is a very personal account.
Part One consists of two chapters. The first chapter is rather general: it looks at the etymology as well as at the definition of the concept ‘garden’ and takes us through the history of Western European garden culture. Starting with the origin of gardens some 12.000 years ago we swiftly travel through gardens in the Antiquities, Medieval sober gardens, harmonious Renaissance gardens, rigid and formal Baroque gardens, painterly romantic gardens in the Romantic era, Modernist cozy gardens and end in our contemporary democratic backyards. The second chapter zooms in on gardens and visual arts. It starts with a visual break – which is to be enjoyed in the visual appendix – and moves on to analyzing the practices of the following four gardener-artists: Claude Monet, Edward Steichen, Derek Jarman and Elspeth Diederix. A brief chapter dedicated to the relationship between the photographic medium and the garden concludes Part One.
Part Two is about my personal relationship with gardens and gardening. The first subchapter explains that, to me, gardening is both spiritual and political. It is spiritual because it helps me to connect to both the physical and non-physical, it is meditative and magical. At the same time gardening is political. Producing your own fruit and veg is an anti-capitalist act, a hopeful investment in the future, and challenges our capitalist notion of time. The second subchapter introduces the concept of ‘imaginary garden’ and describes its place in my photography practice. It concludes with a comparison between the gardener and the photographer, whose work – in essence – is surprisingly similar.

with Guus Kaandorp

Portraits of twenty of the most common bees in the Amsterdam region. Still lifes of the attributes of natural bee-keepers. 

Collaboration with The Natural History Museum Rotterdam and Wellbeeing. 

Experimental and playful project documenting the transformation of my parents garden in Aalsmeer. 

@aalsmeerplotproject