Arjan van Helmond
Arjan van Helmond
The Garden of Life Flowers
Painter Arjan van Helmond, who won the Jeanne Oosting Prize for figurative painting in 2017, has also been working with ceramics and textiles in recent years. In 2024, he and product developer Marjan van Oeffelt made four tapestries measuring approximately 400 x 160 cm for the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam. The fabrics are part of an installation called The garden of life flowers. It includes 16 round ceramic paintings that Helmond created in the EKWC, a ceramics research centre outside Tilburg. The works are displayed on three floors of the stairwell of the Pharmacy Building and in the clinic’s Oncotheek.
For this assignment, Van Helmond was inspired by plants that are used to make medicines. The jacquard-woven tapestries are based on chalk drawings of gardens. To retain the drawings’ dreamy quality, a lot of soft mohair and woollen yarns were used. The elements with sharper contours, like the paths, were made with smooth shiny yarns. The tapestries symbolise the four phases of medicine development: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Van Helmond enjoyed weaving so much that he decided to use the time he had left in the lab to make an extra tapestry for ‘Rupture’, an exhibition he curated for Galerie Gerhard Hofland in Amsterdam.
Photos by Sander Tiedema
