FOREWARD: Electric Fields and Digital Blooms.
"For me, there is no work to be done without walking first...because when you walk you see - you see the plants, you see the forest air - you have the nature experience."
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Perambulation means to travel over or through, especially on foot; it is the act of walking around, surveying land, or touring; it is to saunter, promenade, amble, mosey, meander, or ramble; it is to walk for the sake of pleasure.
Through a visual and conceptual act of perambulation, this publication forms new trajectories, ways of seeing and personal encounters with complex natural environments, as outlined by the process-based practice of Tijn Meulendijks.
Meulendijks’ is an artist, educator and environmentalist whose work is inspired by the transcendental experiences of the natural world and informed by a scientific enquiry. His work is not about the end result alone, but about the process of making—its thinking, meditating, caring—and in particular, its walking—as an act to encounter the Sublime.
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Netherlands-born and Cairns-based, Meulendijks considers ecologically and socially complex landscapes from a foreign perspective, sowing seeds of Romanticism to make familiar again those latent relationships we have with the earth.
Combining the sensibilities of an educator and an environmentalist, Meulendijks considers the consequent devastations of colonialism and its on-going environmental impact through his artistic practice. In July and August 2020, harvesting an invasive local grass from North Queensland—known as Green panic grass, or Megathyrsus Maximus—he constructed Gramineae, a large-scale immersive sculpture, in his Cairns studio. Utilising this grass as a primary source for the sculpture, he not only extracts the panic grass but excavates a deep-rooted anxiety that is associated with weeds. This gesture also gleans a socio-political interpretation, wherein the act of up-rooting reveals the dangers of an aggressive under-growth. However, the gentle and attentive ways in which Meulendijks harvests theses grasses seeks to educate his audiences, and blooms a certain lyrism that evokes awe, transformation, and healing.
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Gramineae sought to underpin the integral relationships and implicit impacts humans have upon an immediate ecology. Through close observation and inherent reverence of the landscape, Meulendijks celebrates a vital, holistic ecology—a mutual, two-way relationship of nurturing and caring. The work Gramineae, as like many other works of Meulendijks’ practice, reflects what he calls “nature experiences.”
These nature experiences are a sensory-dialogues encountered when meander in nature and spend time observing the botanic world. “Within these works, I attempt to find an engagement with those sites—with the landscape, with nature, our nature experiences and memories. To focus on both habitat, location and grass species, and a working method guided by their morphology. I work towards an experience, a sensory one with fragile movements and fragrance.”
Gramineae was intended to be installed at Incinerator Gallery (Moonee Valley, Victoria) from June to August 2020, however due to the travel limitations resultant of COVID-19, the project took root in a virtual space instead, utilising the electric fields of the internet to perambulate and digitally bloom. The project unfurled across several chapters that documented the collaborative research, conservation and growth of Meulendijks’ practice through a digital trajectory, expanding beyond the initial grass sculpture. During these eight weeks, he worked closely with colleagues and kin to photograph flowering grass clods, video walking conversations in nature, conduct discursives on science and art, and excavate earth samples as poetic discourse.
"These landscape samples, for me they also relate to walking, direct to the action of walking, because walking or wandering...as in, walking without a destination...is the desire for the unity between human and nature...walking establishes an immediate contact."
These landscape samples are like little footsteps, he says, perfect compositions made by the non-human, collected and reposited from places one might walk over. As we learn in Fieldwork/ “Where we once walked/ Where we might walk again—(perhaps our ears also filled with Beethoven’s Symphony no.6 ‘the Pastorale’)—these footsteps become vegetative objects containing reminders of those walks; they are connected to a location, a place, a muse, or a day dream. A season after rain, before rain, morning, afternoon.
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The exhibition Gramineae presented via the Incinerator Gallery website was the first incarnation towards this publication. It was the virtual landscape fostering the creative principles and sustainable philosophy of Meulendijks—a praxis that adopts arrangements observed in a flourishing natural ecosystem, a harmonious integration of the landscape with people, and utilises a whole systems thinking.
This publication surveys his 17-year environmentally-informed arts practice, and poetically pictorialises the effects the plant world has upon human emotion and psychology. And indeed, Meulendijks is a poet, whose observations in nature are burgeoning and fruitful articulations. In the chapter Caesitas “Blueness” we hear the breath of these little blue flower drawings:
“A walk through those grasslands with no other reason than to be there, to achieve a sense of belonging. In the sphere of the landscape experience of the Romanticism. These drawings are morning drawings per se, as the tiny flowers of Commelina cyanea are only flowering in the early morning while the dew of the previous night is still present over the field. When the sun dries up the dew, the flowers are no more.”
Meulendijks’ tender observations and careful harvest of organic materials allows inspiration to bloom, as he sustains a fundamental recognition of the ecological life force that mutually supports us all.
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Ultimately, the artistic practice of Tijn Meulendijks encourages slow-looking, and the act of slow-looking informs the next step forward—it is to take account (and accountability) of our relationship within natural ecosystems, and therein tread softly into the future. Because, when we go for a walk, we take our thoughts into new trajectories.
Jake Treacy Curator, Incinerator Gallery