Along lines

The assignment was to create an object for the back wall of the arbour adjacent to a house which is situated in the old centre of the city of Dordrecht in the Netherlands. One idea was to do something with the grids of the arbour by extending the lines of the grids on to the wall thus forming a link with the structure of the arbour.

The other idea was to take as a starting point an old city map of Dordrecht with its rivers and canals and the buildings along the water. With those two ideas I wanted to create one image. I started working from the cartographic image of the Dordrecht map, reliefs placed at eye level on the wall. To find the connection with the upper side of the wall, I saw that the colour of the reliefs on the top had to correspond with the colour of the ‘river line’, so that the lines formed an extension of the grids as well a relation with the city map.

The result is a series of eight clay slabs with geometrical, carved lines for the top of the wall and on eye level a line of twice fourteen clay slabs.