Gratitude – Watering the Woods
02.09.2017

Jasper Griepink (b. Eindhoven, 1988, lives and works in Amsterdam) investigates ways to achieve a healthy, sustainable future, for the earth and for humankind – both body and soul. He does so by studying spiritual thinkers and traditional healers and visiting alternative communities and shamans all over the world. Permaculture, the knowledge of designing the human living environment in a sustainable way, has also recently begun to play an increasingly important role for him.

Griepink’s work often consists of installations that visitors can enter, which function as sacred spaces for their mental healing and inner awareness. The interconnection between the visitors is also significant. For Disruption Griepink had designed a garden in and around a dome-shaped greenhouse, inspired by druidic rituals. Since ancient times, druids have come together in forest clearings, the were considered sacres, to learn from Mother Nature.

This work by Griepink, who has himself joined a society of druids, functions as both a greenhouse and a space for meditation and reflection. The greenhouse contains varieties of wild plants found at De Oude Warande, which are edible or can be used, for example, in medicines, cosmetics and cleaning materials. Seeds have been sown, cuttings planted, paths and seats created.

Griepink’s Grove 2.0 - Kapel van de Wilde Wijsheid (Chapel of the Wild Wisdom) deliberately creates a cross-pollination between ancient paganism and the modern reassessment of ecological awareness by making the statement of employing a greenhouse as a sacred meeting place. Like Griepink’s whole oeuvre, the project is in line with the modern tendency to seek reflection on the relationship between humans and the earth, which according to the artist is a reinvention of old nature religions in a new guise.

For Brief Encounters ’17 Griepink conceived the meditation-performance and workshop Gratitude – Watering the woods (2017), taking place around his greenhouse Grove 2.0, whereby artist and participants-performers, under the guidance of music on custom made wooden instruments, shared the emotion of gratitude with the surrounding nature. This performance brought people into deep raid and even to tears, aided by the mesmerizing composition of Maia Lyon Daw, who herself played the harp as well as a number of custom made percussion instruments.

Compostion and instruments
Maia Lyon Daw