Posbank

I live close to the Veluwezoom, and the Posbank is a familiar landscape to me. My mugs are often inspired by my own photos of buildings, technology and nature. With this series I wanted to go a step further: not a photo of the landscape, but the shape of the landscape itself.

The shape of the relief is not invented. It is measured. The Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland (AHN) maps the whole of the Netherlands with laser scans from aircraft, accurate to half a metre. Buildings and trees are filtered out, leaving only the bare ground surface. This data is public and free to use via PDOK.

From that elevation data I made contour lines every 5 metres. Each contour line becomes a layer of 1 millimetre of clay, and every mug has five of them. I carve the bottom two layers by hand out of the wall of the mug. The top three I build up with thin slabs of clay, which I cut to size on the mug. Each mug shows a strip 1.2 kilometres long and about 360 metres wide, running once around the mug. Because 1 millimetre of clay equals 5 metres of height, the relief is almost true to scale.

The five mugs: Pavilion (77–98 m NAP), West flank (55–75 m), East flank (55–75 m), Dry valley (45–65 m) and Foot (35–55 m).

The Posbank is a push moraine. It formed in the penultimate ice age, some 150,000 years ago, when the ice sheet pushed the ground up here. The dry valleys in the slope formed later: while the ground was frozen, meltwater carved them out.