Our landscape was designed eighty years ago on the developers’ drawing table. Straight lines and a planned allotment of nature, agricultural areas and the villages around Emmeloord. You can still see that design reflected in our roads, fields, farms, dykes, ditches, canals and panoramic views. But here and there the straight lines are beginning to fade. For example, the avenues of trees along the roads are no longer standing so neatly after so many years. And of course nature takes her own course in the end, whether designed or not. It’s an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists, who make landscape art in this panoramic landscape imbued with history, like Pier+ Horizon and Deltawerk//. At this conjuncture, the past and the present are joined together again.
Deltawerk// is a gigantic artwork in the water. The concrete colossus is impressive and touching at the same time. Artists Ronald Rietveld and Erick de Lyon pay tribute to the Deltawerk// the hundreds of hydraulic experiments conducted in the Waterloopbos woods. The inspiration for the artwork is the Delta flume, which was built at the end of the 1970s in the woods.
In this almost 200 metre long concrete colossus, waves metres high were created, with which the flood barrier in Zeeland was tested. The concrete, once standing proudly in a line, is now askew and crooked. And lichens, mosses and plants like ferns have started colonising it, and are gradually turning the artwork green.
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Somewhere hidden behind a farmer’s field and the Zwartemeerdijk at Kraggenburg lies the landscape artwork Pier + Horizon by Paul de Kort. The pier extends several metres into the Zwarte Meer lake and is surrounded by floating crates overgrown with reeds. The art says something about the landscape and the history of the Noordoostpolder. The pier draws on the old breakwater that was always here, reaching towards the nearby Vogeleiland. And the horizon says a great deal about the spaciousness; in the Noordoostpolder the horizon is always visible. A large part of the Zwarte Meer lake is protected nature reserve. You can understand why as soon as you look at Pier+Horizon. Gazing out over the water you see thousands of birds on and around the water. For example, the rare great reed warbler has been spotted there.
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