Some weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet with Mrs. Eckert-Schweizer who is writing for the duesselbotanica, a small online-magazine about botanics. So If you want to know a bit more about my work and the collaboration with the botanical garden in Düsseldorf feel free to visit!
the article is in German.
Building the Diorama was the first time that I produced my own fake leafs. But for making a leaf out of plastic you have to start with a real one - luckily enough I got some help by the gardeners of the botanical garden in Düsseldorf which provided me fresh plant material almost every week. Back in my studio I used the fresh materials to make casts out of plaster and used a thermoforming machine to form the translucent plastic into leafs. I then painted every leaf by hand, using various techniques and materials.
everything about dioramas is fake. hear me out - the plants you see are either out of plastic or conserved and colored dead plants, arranged just perfectly to blend in with the hand painted landscape on the curved background, leaving a little spot in front for a little scenery... eventually with one or more stuffed animals inside. Everything you see is the result of hours and hours of hard work made possible by taxidermists, painters, sculptors and more. Even though the illusion might not be perfect all the time, If you squint a little bit you could forget for a second or two that you're not in a museum but in a forest far far away.
Most dioramas are designed to represent a natural habitat, but although in the working process the diorama builders work closely with biologists and zoologists, the execution is still based only on the current state of knowledge. What we see is a dream world, a time capsule - we are presented with a "pristine nature", a place where the influence of us humans has not yet taken over. The diorama shows a world without the intervention of man, which was created by the intervention of man. In a way, you could say that we are building a world on the concept of nature, where we have decided what nature actually is.