Alles Stroomt*

Photo by Sander Heezen

What a wonderful, crazy year this is. After my England adventures, I had one more to look forward to, Into The Great Wide Open*** on the Wadden Island Vlieland. 

I never been to a Wadden Island before and put it last year on my wish-list for this year. Lucky me, my project got selected in April to be shown during the festival in September.

In the beginning of May al artists where invited to check out their locations, meet the forester Erik and get a small preview with Here Comes The Summer. It was pretty cold, and being home only two weeks after Cambridge it felt a bit strange being away again to another island. But I also felt so fortunate that this was and is my job!The project idea I send in was to make a ricecarpet that would be best visible from a high lookout. The pattern for the carpet would be based on a local popular motif. During my visit to the island and afterwards I gathered a lot of information about Vlieland and the specific location for my carpet called 'Sjouwersmanbol' (something like "Porters-man-bulwark"). On this viewpoint is now an ex-NAVO range. From this high steel construction you get a great view over the island, the sea channel between Vlieland and Terschelling, the sandbank Richel and a lot of water. The natural viewpoint was used by cargo porters to spot the incoming ships through the sea channel. They then had enough time to run towards the harbor and secure the shipment.

Looking at old maps and "spekmatten"** I noticed one clear motif, a symbol used on every map and I also found it on a lot of other things on Vlieland: A Windrose.****

All pointing North, I used 4 different motifs to make 35 windroses out of cooked rice. During the three festival days, 5 till 7 September 2014, the ricecarpet slowly disappeared while the birds eat from it. 

Below the making-of and audience taking a closer look. If you made a picture of "Alles Stroomt", please share it with me, thanks!

Making-of 

Audience taking a closer look

*****

Would like to end this post with a special thanks to my assistent Koen de Wit who spend hours cooking all the rice for me, thanks honey!

* "Panta rhei" / "Everything flows"

** "Spekmatten" are floor mats made by sailors. On board they kept the needle in the grease so it wouldn't rust.

*** On the Into The Great Wide Open site my work was featured as 'Oogst van de dag 1' 
**** Previous works inspired by windroses can be found in the blogpost "Was ist ist, was nicht ist ist möglich" on De reis naar Batik & on YouTube see "Dance in a ricecarpet"
***** Last photo is by nicolettepet on Istagram