Tidying my workspace today I let the ‘Dutch Space is Different’ travel books go through my hands – found myself making a small monument for ‘A Humument ‘. It is worthy of being on a pedestal – I owe Tom Phillips homage.

Phillips’ is a monumental effort – working on and in his book, mining it for images and stories since 1966. Page by page, now into a second version. This is what I blogged about him in 2015:

Itching

The thing that I came to recognise during our trip in 2016 was that every country we visited had something Dutch woven into its history: South Africa [Afrikaans], Japan [Deshima], Australia [discovered by ..], New Zealand [also discovered by …], America [New Amsterdam]. Dutch space may be different – but it also got exported a lot in the 17th century, the Dutch ‘Golden Age’.

See below a selection of my drawings/collage. Looking back, I think it worked to mine the books, also the collages with torn paper are good. Not so sure about the block-printed words, but there you go.

For more drawings, also for photos, check here and here and here and here and here.