A botanist-turned-artist in South Africa’s Cape Winelands creates lifelike insects using decayed and preserved natural materials he forages.
Text Lori Cohen
Production Sven Alberding
Photographs Warren Heath
A butterfly’s antenna is club-shaped with a long shaft and a bulb at the point. The end of the style of an African protea flower happens to look identical. Botanical artist Chris van Niekerk’s work is about finding these examples of similitude in nature. Using leaves, seeds and other plant materials, Chris meticulously combines and assembles them, metamorphosing his foraged finds into insect forms.
”I call my insects ecoskeletons; it’s a wordplay on the exoskeleton of a beetle,” explains Chris. In his studio, the walls are crawling with his ‘insects’ – from scorpions to green-winged butterflies – all handmade through Chris’s obsessive creative vision.
Chris expounds that one, a wild-looking bee with a downy abdomen, has a lifelike striped abdomen made from individual grass seeds, which he placed with precision over many hours to mimic delicate body hairs. Next to it, a butterfly has wings fashioned from pressed leaves—the pulp removed to expose the veins to resemble the structure of a wing.
Sometimes, the materials he chooses will dictate the artwork, says Chris, referring to the butterfly with its leafy green wings. They began life as magnolia leaves which Chris processed to remove the pulp, leaving the delicate veins of the leaf exposed like a carcass, only to find a second life as a wing on one of Chris’s ecoskeltons. ”It also works the other way around where I draw the insect, breaking it down into its components, and then I look for materials to create it,” he explains.
He is surrounded by inspiration. In his studio, natural elements are dried, pressed and sometimes coloured using handmade vegetable dyes or charcoal. Chris is constantly tinkering with various plants in stages of decay and preservation, some of which take weeks to process.
He’s always been a collector, he confesses, but the previous lives of all the objects in his studio, not just the plant materials, contribute equally to his work. The rugged workbench in the heart of the studio, the antique crafts tools he uses, and medical journals from the 1930s used to press leaves, form part of his creative ecosystem. ”There’s a flow of energy and exchange between the pages and the plants, and the wood and the insects that are part of the process,” he says.
Chris’s studio is crammed with bottles containing the medium for his work – seeds, leaves and other unidentifiable fragments of flower anatomy, painstakingly collected and catalogued. ”I forage a lot,” says Chris. ”The fynbos plant kingdom we have in the Western Cape offers a lot of possibilities. They are tough and textured,” says Chris.
He explains he has always been fascinated by the shapes and textures of flora and, even as a child, saw plants not as individual elements but as something bigger in context with space. He grew up in the rural Free State, the youngest of three brothers, where the farm was his playground. A quiet, introspective child, he recalls collecting thorns from trees and making patterns in the sand. When he makes his ‘insects’, he says he channels the same contentment he felt roaming the arid landscapes of his youth.
Having studied horticulture, Chris went on to practice as a horticulturist for six years. However, the desire to create was strong, and he moved on to launch an events company renowned for its conceptual spaces and massive flower and décor installations. He says it was a transitional time between Chris-the-horticulturist and where he is most comfortable identifying as an artist.
”The installations I created had a beginning and an end. I longed to create something more permanent,” he says. A decade later, Chris has conceived an entirely different habitat for his work. His home and studio are nestled in a cottage part of a historic rural homestead in the heart of winemaking country.
These days, he finds satisfaction in creating pieces on a small scale, attracted to the challenge and limitations of a process that requires extreme concentration, creativity, and patience. ”I’m obsessed with detail,” says Chris. One piece could take Chris up to four days to make, sitting for hours at a time with tweezers and magnifiers. Chris says making them to scale, or entomologically correct, doesn’t interest him. ”I use reference books as a starting point, but I’m not trying to replicate particular species. It’s about creating a piece of beauty.”