'Wortels'

Part of my roots are in ‘Oost Zeeuws-Vlaanderen’ in the south west of the Netherlands. My grandfather, whom I never knew and whose last name I bear, spent his entire childhood and youth there. And I imagine him walking through the fields there and seeing the beauty of the flax and hearing the stories about the madder. In this area of the Netherlands flax is still grown and madder was grown there in the past.

In ‘Wortels’ in which madder and flax play an important role, those roots come together in a literal and figurative way. Since I am a Linen Steward and I grow flax, I pull the flax with root and all out of the ground at the end of every growing season. Some of the madder I used for this work I dug up myself at the ‘Nederlands Openlucht Museum’ in Arnhem.
And in this work that has my human size, all my research on flax possibilities come together too. While working on it I felt more and more rooted and grounded, during the weaving, I reacted intiutively to what was occurring, such as the winding of the thread colored with madder and all the different shades of color that emerged during the dyeing of the loose fiber. And each step in the process of making brought me wonder at the versatility and beauty of flax and madder dyeing.