Artwork Data
Title
De Tuindersgeschiedenis
Artist
Year
2011
Material
keramiek
Partial collection
Artwork Location
Address
Westergosingel, Den Haag
City district
Wateringseveld
GPS data
52.034596802627, 4.2934432224624 View on map
Artwork Description
Text
For the neighbourhood Wateringse Binnentuinen four artists have been invited, all working with ceramics. They have created works of art to beautify the bridges and the pond. Tejo Philips is one of them. He has applied blue and white ceramics to the three bridges leading to the school complex on Laantje van Salland. At first glance, it seems as if he has made cheerful fruit and playful vegetables in blue. But appearances can be deceptive. If you come a little closer, you wonder whether what you see is actually fruit and vegetables.
That is because Philips has given its tomatoes a lamp holder and its peppers a water sprinkler. Philips does this combining of the organic with the mechanical in all its work, whether it is autonomous or applied as here. In Wateringse Veld, he makes an explicit reference to the past. After all, this land used to be the site of intensive horticulture. The bunches of grapes refer to the Westland grape grown here. In addition to vegetables and fruit, Philips also makes visible the artificial techniques used to grow them. A combination of nature and technology. Philips also brought back the pipes, the boats for transport and the greenhouses themselves. The latter have been applied to the tile tableaux that adorn the seats in the middle of the bridges.
All ceramics are painted in different colours of light blue. With this, the artist naturally makes the connection with the world-famous Delft blue. At the same time, he is also referring to Delfland, the water board that used to cover Wateringen and now Wateringse Veld. That water board has a blue and white logo.
Philips studied ceramics at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He then completed an internship at Struktuur 68 in The Hague. With a sense of humour and an almost cartoon-like design, he refers to the way nature and technology relate to each other in our world and how we deal with them.