“Is there such a thing as portable green? What role can mobile nature play in the urban environment? The ‘Exhaust Garden’ offers a solution! Suppose you want to get away as a city dweller. You step into your portable garden, put on the shoulder straps and off you go: strolling through the busy city with your nose between the plants and grasses.”
exhaust garden
“It all starts with a contribution to the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ exhibition in the Museum of Religious Art in Uden. In consultation with sculptor / landscape gardener Hans van Lunteren I make the ‘ENCLASS GARDEN’. The perspective within this portable garden has been reversed; it is nature that walls and shields man. The motif of the enclosed garden refers to the Garden of Eden or the Earthly Paradise where man lived in harmony with nature. The approach to paradise as something small and personal opens up interesting possibilities, of course.
Man destroys nature, man protects nature. The artists have played with this fact. They have reversed the perspective. With them, man is enclosed in a portable garden; the Homo Hortus Conclusus.
The square meter garden regularly goes outside, into nature, around the shoulders of people. The exuberant garden. Later versions of the ‘ENCLASS GARDEN’ have been developed specifically for the theme of an exhibition or respond to current events.”
UITLAATTUIN-model-succulent
“When I notice a part of a hoe with the striking handle in addition to a wooden container intended for chalks and erasers among the waste at a primary school, a more manageable form of the ‘OUTLET GARDEN’ is born.
The ‘EXHAUST GARDEN’ has a wealth of possibilities. You can fill it with all kinds of herbs, vegetables or plants. You can of course make a statement by using your portable garden for endangered bees and butterflies. But you can also turn your garden into a mobile weather station, for example, by using guichelheil. Because the flowers of this plant close quickly when bad weather is on the way, guichelheil is also used as a (poor man) barometer.” [credit]