NATURE AND Nurture

A horticulturist-turned-artist in South Africa’s Cape Winelands creates lifelike insects using natural materials.

Abutterfly’s antenna is club-shaped with a long shaft and a bulb at the point. The end of the style of an African protea flower happens to look identical. For botanical artist Chris van Niekerk, his work is all about finding these examples of similitude in nature. Using leaves, seeds and other plant materials, van Niekerk meticulously combines and assembles them, metamorphosing his foraged finds into insect forms.

“I call my insects eco-skeletons; it’s a wordplay on the exoskeleton of a beetle,” explains van Niekerk.

In his studio, the walls are crawling with his handmade ‘insects’ – from scorpions to green-winged butterflies – all born of his obsessive creative vision.

One, a wild-looking bee with a downy abdomen, van Niekerk explains, has a lifelike striped abdomen made from individual grass seeds that he placed with precision over many hours to mimic delicate body hairs. Next to it, a butterfly has wings fashioned from pressed leaves – the pulp removed to expose the veins, resembling the structure of a wing.

Sometimes the materials he chooses will dictate the artwork, says van Niekerk, referring to the butterfly with its leafy green wings. They began life as magnolia leaves which van Niekerk processed to remove the pulp, leaving the fine veins of the leaf exposed like a carcass, only to find a second life as a wing on one of van Niekerk’s ecoskeletons. “It also works the other way around where I make a drawing of the insect, breaking it down into its components, and then I look for materials to create it,” he explains.

He is surrounded by inspiration. In his studio, natural elements are dried, pressed and sometimes coloured using handmade vegetable dyes or charcoal. Van Niekerk is constantly tinkering with various plants in stages of decay and preservation, some of which take weeks to process.

He’s always been a collector, he confesses, but the previous lives of all the objects in his studio, not just the plant materials, contribute equally to his work. The rugged workbench in the heart of the studio, the antique craft tools he uses and medical journals from the 1930s used to press leaves all form part of his creative ecosystem. “There’s a flow of energy, and exchange between the pages and the