Constructed nature Dutch artist Anne ten Donkelaar’s interest in the natural world is evident in her intricate and dynamic dried-flower constructions
Anne ten Donkelaar combines pressed real flowers and paper images to create fantastical floral landscapes
WORDS MARIEKE VAN GESSEL PHOTOGRAPHS LOUIS LEMAIRE / INSIDEHOMEPAGE
Anne ten Donkelaar is fascinated by the beauty she finds in nature’s quirky shapes and forms. The walls of her studio in Utrecht, the Netherlands, are lined with the delicate, three-dimensional collages she calls her Flower Constructions: hybrid works combining pressed real flowers and paper floral images cut from old books, which she displays in wooden frames made by her husband, product designer Vladi Rapaport, who also made her large flower press and the wooden rail from which she hangs her flowers, seedheads and branches to dry.
Like Vladi, Anne studied 3D product design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, but her work was always more poetic than practical. “My graduation project consisted of very fragile glass jewellery containing real butterflies,” she says. After graduating in 2007, she carried on making jewellery but failed to make much money, and tried a change of tack designing cushions embroidered with flowers and butterflies. It was while she was putting together moodboards for her cushion designs that she realised the boards themselves were more interesting than her intended needlework. She submitted some of the moodboards with cut-outs of flowers, dried stems and seedheads to a design exhibition organised by Dutch Elle Decoration. The pieces were a success, her cushions abandoned and the Flower Constructions born.
These carefully composed collages are a mix of pictures taken from old gardening books combined with natural materials she collects from her garden and from nature. She begins by gluing the pictures to paper to give them more strength. She then dries and flattens them in a flower press before cutting each one out by hand and laying out her composition on white, acid-free, cardboard foamboard. Once she is happy with the result, she painstakingly pins every single flower, seedhead and stem to the white background. “By cutting the pins to different lengths I can create a surprisingly dynamic and poetic floating effect that is enhanced by the play of light and shadow.”
Anne’s newest works include her Underwater Ballet series, in which she photographs flowers floating in a water tank that appear to have been caught in a spirited dance, and a new series of installations using funeral bouquets. “I don’t treat the dried flowers with chemicals,” she says, “so I can never guarantee how long their colours will last. But the people who commission these works appreciate this link to the transience of nature, and of life in general.”
“By cutting the pins to different lengths, I can create a dynamic floating effect that’s enhanced by the play of light and shadow”