This wall hanging is born from an artist-in-residence at the mobile garden studio of her longtime friend — and one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated painters : Marc Mulders.
Situated on Baest Estate, a protected natural area, Marc’s extraordinary wildflower gardens became both muse and laboratory. Immersed in this living landscape, renewed each spring with wildflowers, Marc finds inspiration for his quiet activist art. It was here that he invited Kiki to share the studio, a glass-fronted space that moves between different garden “rooms” and opens directly to the changing world outside. Kiki embraced the invitation, staying on the estate to experience it from morning dew to evening glow.
Secluded yet deeply connected to nature, she worked in calm concentration, drawing on the shifting rhythms of flora and fauna. With her wide archive of fabrics, she experimented in a contemporary impressionistic way: cutting, pasting, weaving, and layering what she saw, felt, and almost feared losing. Her sketches are like magnified medieval miniatures, they reveal the hidden structures of nature.
Memories of a Garden is about more than beauty. It reflects on the growing importance of gardens as refuges for biodiversity, as cooling havens in a warming world, and as places where humanity recalls its bond with nature. As urbanisation accelerates and real gardens vanish beneath concrete and artificial grass, her tapestries stand as both tribute and call to action: look, care, preserve.
The result is a tactile, intricate series of four jacquard-woven tapestries, created at the TextielMuseum Tilburg, blending hemp, wool, paper, and gold yarns.
