April 16 – September 25, 2011

Frank Bruggeman (1966) was asked by the Zeeuws Museum to make a selection from the largely ‘forgotten’ natural history collection of the Royal Zeeland Society of Arts and Sciences and to combine this selection with a few of his own pieces, old and new. The result is a hybrid kind of exhibition, presenting modern art and design as well as botanical and historical information in a bright and meaningful context.

Bruggeman comes up with a very surprising choice of curiosities, oddities and misfits, that would not normally appear in a natural history exhibition: from a branch of a chestnut tree that has grown around an oyster shell to a bird’s nest diorama with a beheaded wren, from a piece of a black mulberry tree that was alegedly planted in 1433 by Jacoba van Beieren (Countess of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland) to a late nineteenth-century beetle-preparation set that was left behind when the beetles itself were transferred to another museum in 1975. Yet this is not a travesty of a natural history exhibition. Bruggeman takes this unpretentious and unnoticed objects very serious by presenting them in an impressive cyan blue showcase. On first sight this showcase seems to be an exact replica of a nineteenth century showcase but on closer inspection one finds that it is skillfully made of ordinary window frames. With regard to the oddities and misfits on display, there is a lot more to learn and discover than one would expect. The stories behind these objects are recorded in free fact sheets and in the book-sized catalogue that accompanies this exhibition.

Also on display is a large selection of pages from a recently discovered herbarium from the end of the seventeenth century. The dramatic fragility of these dried plants – some have been eaten by insects entirely but have yet managed to leave an impression – is not at all disturbed by the showcases in which they are displayed, which have a very robust quality. These specially designed showcases have also been given a cyan blue coating. This very artificial shade of blue, that does not exist in the plant kingdom, reminds us that while we are looking at plant material, this material is presented in a very staged way. There are strong similarities in staging and composition between the herbarium and Bruggemans own flowerpieces, plantscapes and plantlike objects. Several of these pieces and objects are part of this exhibition. In his well-known nature object #1 Bruggeman combines dead plant materials with fresh picked flowers from wastelands. A new object, presented here for the first time and still without a name, consists of three entangled exhaust pipes that evoke the image of a large madder root. Also new is the everywhere tool trolley, an intriguing object that could easily be the prototype as well the ultimate Hummer-like version of a tool trolley for horticulturalists.

To counterbalance dead nature – in the form of the natural history exhibits and the herbarium – Bruggeman finally comes up with Observing a polder, a 42 minute film of a day in the life of the Hertogin Hedwigepolder, a small polder on the Belgian border that might be flooded in the near future as the result of a treaty between the Netherlands and Belgium. Observing a polder, jointly made with Roel van Tour, offers a truly authentic experience of a man-made landscape where nature over the years has slowly crept back in.

Peter Zwaal