The Plantin-Moretus Museum digitised 14,000 woodcuts. To promote this collection, the museum invited eight artists to create a work based on the images. I was one of the artists who took part in the project.

For my piece, I looked for an animal that lives in wood and ended up choosing the longhorn beetle. The larva of this beetle lives inside wood. Imagine one of these beetles entering the museum’s depot, laying its eggs in the woodcut collection, and the larvae crawling from block to block, each time taking a small part of the woodcut with them. Once the larva pupates and becomes a beetle, it carries a body composed of different textures.

That idea formed the concept for my work. To transfer the textures from the woodblocks to my sculpture, I created cyanotypes based on a selection of the woodcuts. As a result, my sculpture incorporates three printing techniques:

1. the original woodcut

2. the cyanotype prints

3. the internal structure used to assemble and shape the work

I then framed the leftover paper materials in overlapping layers, making them resemble the tunnels created by the larvae of the longhorn beetle.

This work was part of the exhibition Impressed by Plantin in 2020.