Titel of work: ‘Hill of beans’
Location: De Kapeltuin, Breda (NL)
Year: 2015
In 2014 I got a suprize email inviting me for a kind of residency at De Kapeltuin, a community garden, in Breda (NL).
They saw a ricecarpet by me in the very beginning of my still short career. Contemplating how to proceed with my ricecarpets, my temporary ephemeral organic carpets, after my projects in England, it come at the perfect moment. I didn’t just wanted to make a work on location, I wanted it to grow on location. I made a plan and happily it was excepted.
The carpets that I normally make are made with materials I just buy at Toko, supermarkets and organic stores. In Cambridge and London I experimented with waste from pubs and given materials from homes. Resulting in different, interesting works on maybe even more interesting locations.
How can I make my work more sustainable, is the question I’m asking myself. So I’m making my own materials. I’m planted the seeds and with the harvest I’m making my temporary carpet.
So sowing the seeds, reaping them and taking care of the plants till harvest. A seed to seed project.
To stretch this cycle even further, the seeds I use for the temporary carpets, are selected on the quality of the seeds. So people can take the seeds with them during the Harvest festival and plant them again.
They not only take a seed with them, but also a little bit of history about De Kapeltuin. Every seed together tells the whole story. So in this way, people get invited to share.
It’s more than a harvest to eat. It’s a heirloom, captured in one seed.
Read more on sabinebolk.blogspot.nl
Hill of beans is an ongoing project;
I presented the project;
in 2016 at Reclaim the Seeds in Wageningen
in 2017 at Open Source Event in Tilburg
& every year I try to find new locations for it to grow;
Hill of beans-beans grew;
in 2016 in Uden and Breda (NL)
in 2017 at Cityplot in Amsterdam, Uden, Breda (NL) and during the exhibition Rita McBride: Explorer at WIELS (B) in the project Lonely fingers
in 2018 in Utrecht, Uden and Breda (NL)
To keep ‘Hill of Beans’ growing and continuing, I collect the harvest beans after every season, creating my own little ‘Hill of beans’-seedbank in the process.