The Allotment Labyrinth
Hoogcruts (HX) – Summer 2022
Born from the desire to bring together the sharing of food and the act of painting, the Labyrinth is both the soil on which edible plants grow and the inspiration for future paintings. The project began from this impulse to explore how cultivating, eating, and creating art can merge into a single, relational practice.
In the summer of 2022, the first season of the allotment labyrinth garden in Hoogcruts (HX) - an old monastery in the south of Limburg - marked the beginning of this exploration. The garden was developed as a living, circular landscape where cultivation, movement, and contemplation intertwined. The labyrinth itself carries deep symbolic meaning: a single path leads to the center, inviting each step to be taken with awareness, presence, and intention. Walking the labyrinth becomes a ritual of reflection, a slow and mindful journey that mirrors the cycles of growth, tending, and transformation in the garden.
The garden was carefully structured so that the various crops support and enhance each other, creating a dynamic, interdependent ecosystem. At the center of the labyrinth sits a compost heap, serving as both the literal and symbolic heart of the garden, nourishing the soil and sustaining ongoing cycles of growth. Sharing food, tending the plants, and walking the labyrinth all became inseparable aspects of this practice, reinforcing connection, reflection, and attentive care.
This first season laid the foundation for the allotment labyrinth garden as an ongoing artistic and ecological project: a space where painting, gardening, mindful movement, and communal nourishment converge into a unified practice of creativity, presence, and relational engagement.
