ABSTRACT
In 2016 Nico van Breemen interviewed the visual artist herman de vries (1931) on his work titled from earth. Realizing that reality itself is the best model of reality, and being fascinated by the infinite variation of, for example, shapes of individual leaves, and of colors of different soils, de vries started collecting and showing such objects. His collection of thousands of soil samples from all over the world is maintained in the installation musée des terres (“earth museum”) in Musée Gassendi, Digne-les-Bains, France. Samples from this collection are regularly exhibited in other museums and galleries, as small heaps of earth, as rectangular-shaped thin layers of soil on the floor, or as earth rubbings on paper. Such “objective” presentation of (basically just colors of) soils, leave us in wonderment about an aspect of the world around us, that soil scientists thought they knew so well, and that most lay people may have considered to be dull-colored dirt.
