What is 'nature'? Does 'nature' even exist, or is she carefully constructed through human-made landscapes?
Footballfields, dunes, cracks in the pavement, tramtracks, city parks: Grass is everywhere and that omnipresence has made us blind to its complexities. Often it is rather about maintaining and cultivating an idea, rather than the physical presence of grass as a plant. In this project, 'Grassmat', grass becomes a lens through which we examine how ‘Nature’ is not just an absolute entity, but a cultural and socio-political construct.
Focusing on various grass-scapes in The Hague, for example: the invasive grasses of the dunes in Westduinpark, and the carefully regulated pitch of the ADO Den Haag stadium—this work explores the seemingly opposing landscapes with an associative stance.
Using local dunegrass as both a fibre and a concept, the project materialises this research through a series of experiments, at the centre: an alternative football turf made from tufts of dunegrass. The 'tufted turf' proposes a reimagined relationship between the stadium and the natural landscape it is close to. The resulting concept-grasmat bridges the artificial and the organic, reflecting on how our perception of grass shifts with its context. This installation consists of a video and materialbook next to the concept grassmat, to illustrate overlooked connections and connect information to its physical presence.
This work resists traditional categorisations by exploring associative connections between materials, spaces, and meanings. Through this tactile and visual research, Grassmat invites to see beyond the idea of grass.
