Don’t shit where you eat
2023
painting, installation
natural pigments, plant and fungi ink on paper
Van Gogh AIR, Zundert (NL)
Zundert, in the southern Netherlands, is flower country. The town is famous for its annual Corso parade — vast floats built entirely from dahlias — and the landscape around it is shaped almost entirely by agricultural industry. Nitrogen-heavy farming has suppressed the wild flora for decades. The fields are productive and largely lifeless.
During a residency at Van Gogh Huis and Atelier De Moeren in October 2023, Finding the Wild spent two months investigating the botany of the surrounding landscape — foraging plants and fungi from the forest edges, roadsides, and field margins that industrial agriculture had not yet reached. From these they made inks and pigments: an expanding palette of browns, yellows, greens, and occasional purples, each colour a record of what still managed to grow there.
The centrepiece of the residency is a diptych painting — a cow's head and its backside — built in the manner of Arcimboldo: each form assembled entirely from the foraged materials themselves. The head is composed of edible mushrooms; the body from the plants used to make the inks. Every pigment is natural, foraged locally. The cow is both subject and symptom — the animal whose industrial presence has displaced the very organisms it is painted from.
The residency produced several other works: Ink Pourings, a series of drawings made over the duration of the stay showing the interactions between natural pigments at varying pH levels; Dahlia Fountain, an installation using the flower of Zundert as backdrop, with spoon forms cast from Corso leftovers and ink spilling into them from above — a meditation on waste and excess; and a series of paper works made from waste paper and dahlia petals, which exist both as documentation and as independent editions.