THE LICHEN LINE
SITE SPECIFIC OUTDOOR INSTALLATION
SEPTEMBER 2024 - WESTERPARK, AMSTERDAM
ELSPETH DIEDERIX
For centuries, nature has been a favourite subject in art. Mountain landscapes, heathlands, and seascapes are genres in their own right, while ‘indoor’ art features still lifes of flowers, often with exotic blooms in stunning colours. Yet the humble lichen has gone unnoticed—until now. Elspeth Diederix is changing that. Her Lichen Line, a 120-metre-long photographic installation made of concrete tiles featuring lichen patterns, cut through the Westerpark in a subtle dance between man-made order and natural chaos.
“Lichens are fascinating,” Elspeth Diederix says over the phone. “They are neither plants nor true mosses, but fungi. They’re the result of a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga. There are 700 known species in the Netherlands alone. They essentially draw on stone. Initially, I wanted to work with lichens from Westerpark, but they grow very slowly and are fragile, so they are hard to find in the city. I ultimately found most of them at the Ooster Cemetery.”
The slow growth of lichen—about 1 mm per year—contrasts starkly with the work that first brought Diederix (NL, 1971) to fame. She travelled extensively and photographed everyday objects in new contexts, allowing viewers to reconnect with them. One of her most well-known works features a pink post-it note in a snowy birch forest, making the pink slip pop from the photo. Her work changed when she acquired a studio with a garden in 2009. "In a garden, things are always changing. You are constantly seeing something for the first time."
She decided to redesign her garden and enrolled in a garden design course, followed by a landscaping course focusing on garden design. While taking these courses, she started a blog, The Studio Garden, where she could explore her ideas and experiments. Much of her current work originates from ideas tested in the blog. One such idea involves creating patterns in the natural landscape and she is now working on a 'wallpaper' of flower fields for a tunnel in Uitgeest.
An opportunity arose when Let it Grow, an organisation that promotes plants and flowers in urban areas, announced a contest to develop a work of art for Amsterdam that would bring the world of plants and flowers closer to the people. The result was the Miracle Garden, a garden in Erasmus Park that is open year-round and serves as the source material for the Miracle Series, artworks stemming from the garden that are periodically displayed on billboards around the city. As Diederix puts it, she has journeyed into the world of plants and hasn’t left since.
The project for Unseen, Lichen Line, came together relatively quickly. Diederix explains, “Because it’s a commission, you work differently than when creating personal work. You need to make different connections and piece things together more quickly. I spent some time walking around the grounds of the Westergasfabriek. I soon spotted the rectangular concrete tiles along the paths. I also wanted to create something that aligned with what I was currently working on. I had been working on those repeating wallpaper patterns, so it didn’t take long for the idea to take shape.”
Diederix ultimately designed 10 different lichen patterns. “The pattern repeats every 12 metres, but you don’t experience it that way,” she explains. “I want the patterns to make people realise that they aren’t just random lichens, so they take a second look. Lichen Line draws your attention to the beauty of the details in your surroundings—in this case, lichens.”
During a sticker test—the prints are adhered to 120 x 30 x 15 cm concrete tiles—she suddenly realised she had come up with this idea before. She dug into her archives and found sketches made back in 2011 about lichen drawings. “Sometimes it takes a long time before you know what you want to do with something.” Some projects unfold at the pace of a lichen leaving its mark on a stone.
