Constant / Fleur van Dodewaard

This summer Fleur van Dodewaard worked in the forests along the Finnish Archipelago Sea, where the drawing series Outside of Time Drawings at the Finnish Archipelago Sea and the sculpture series As I Looked Up came into being. For the sculptures she used hazel branches, bound together with thin strips of black cotton to form simple, three-dimensional line compositions. Fragile in form, with a void at the centre that is every bit as present as the lines around it.

With this work Van Dodewaard responds obliquely to Constant's New Babylon: the utopian project in which humanity, freed from labour by technology, can devote itself entirely to play and creation within an endlessly expanding environment held under technological control. Van Dodewaard, too, is in search of freedom, happiness and room for creativity, but she does not believe these can be reached through more, as they are for Constant, but rather through less. Not further technology and further building, but a return to simplicity.

This explains her choice of the simplest material there is, available in abundance: branches, organically formed and indifferent to perfection, instead of a high-technology environment that can be adjusted down to the smallest detail. Where New Babylon subdues nature beneath an artificial layer, Van Dodewaard uses precisely what her surroundings happen to offer her. This year that means hazel branches; for her solo exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 2025 it was display material she found in the museum's storage.

That reversal also has an ecological origin. "Drawing with a view of the inland sea, the ceaselessly moving water, the wind through the long grass," she says, "puts things in perspective and makes the 'now' and the infinite coincide. Nature will always endure, even without us." It is time, she believes, that we came to see ourselves as part of nature once again, as a home we must care for rather than a landscape to be subdued. Where Constant's freedom lies in technological control over what can be made, Van Dodewaard's lies in letting go of it.