2025, Veenoordskolk, Deventer, Netherlands
The Ancestors
A work by Ivan Morison
Originally presented as The Reapers IX–XIII
Haylage and locally sourced roundwood timber
Five sculptures, approximately 4–7 metres high
Commissioned for IJsselbiënnale 2025, curated by Mieke Conijn, Josien in ’t Hof and Koen Bril
Developed with Stichting IJssellandschap, Gerard Willemsen and Berrie Klein Swormink
The Ancestors comprised five monumental sculptures installed across the Veenoordskolk, a managed floodplain beside the River IJssel near Deventer. Built by hand from locally sourced haylage and timber, the works rose from the landscape as unstable towers: part haystack, part creature, part ritual structure and part decomposition in progress.
Their location appeared natural but was almost entirely shaped by human intervention. The Veenoordskolk began as a sand quarry, excavated in part to provide material for the nearby A1 motorway. The resulting deep pools were later filled with locally recovered soil and river sediment, their banks softened and islands introduced to create a wetland habitat. The site now accommodates migratory birds, grazing cattle, fluctuating river levels and the infrastructures of flood management. The motorway, industrial estates and the city remain clearly visible around it.
The sculptures occupied this tension between extraction and restoration, land use and ecological recovery. They were commissioned for the 2025 IJsselbiënnale, whose curatorial theme, Boundaries, considered the natural, administrative, social and mental divisions through which landscapes are understood and controlled. At the Veenoordskolk, these boundaries were neither clear nor stable. Agriculture, industry, nature conservation, recreation and water management met within the same constructed terrain.
The work developed through a period of field research with farmers, land managers and others living and working around the IJssel. Morison approached the rural landscape not as a retreat from contemporary life, but as one of its most politically and ecologically charged sites. Decisions made here about food, land ownership, subsidies, chemical inputs, biodiversity and water management carry consequences far beyond the immediate locality.
Stichting IJssellandschap, which manages the site, occupies a pivotal position within these negotiations. The centuries-old land trust stewards a large and varied portfolio of agricultural and ecologically managed land around Deventer. Its work requires it to reconcile long-term environmental objectives with the realities faced by its tenant farmers, navigating systems of regulation and subsidy that can support ecological change while also restricting practical experimentation.
The material for the sculptures was supplied through the work of Gerard Willemsen, an arable farmer and environmental contractor based in Wesepe. Willemsen’s practice connects farming, forestry, landscape maintenance and subsidy-supported environmental work. Hay, stable manure, material cleared from ditches and timber from landscape management circulate through interconnected systems in which the residue of one activity becomes the resource for another.
This practical circularity informed the material logic of the sculptures. The haylage was not selected as a symbolic representation of agriculture. It already belonged to an agricultural and economic cycle. The work temporarily arrested that material, gathering it into sculptural form before allowing it to continue its passage through animals, soil and landscape.
Their location appeared natural but was almost entirely shaped by human intervention. The Veenoordskolk began as a sand quarry, excavated in part to provide material for the nearby A1 motorway. The resulting deep pools were later filled with locally recovered soil and river sediment, their banks softened and islands introduced to create a wetland habitat. The site now accommodates migratory birds, grazing cattle, fluctuating river levels and the infrastructures of flood management. The motorway, industrial estates and the city remain clearly visible around it.
The sculptures occupied this tension between extraction and restoration, land use and ecological recovery. They were commissioned for the 2025 IJsselbiënnale, whose curatorial theme, Boundaries, considered the natural, administrative, social and mental divisions through which landscapes are understood and controlled. At the Veenoordskolk, these boundaries were neither clear nor stable. Agriculture, industry, nature conservation, recreation and water management met within the same constructed terrain.
The work developed through a period of field research with farmers, land managers and others living and working around the IJssel. Morison approached the rural landscape not as a retreat from contemporary life, but as one of its most politically and ecologically charged sites. Decisions made here about food, land ownership, subsidies, chemical inputs, biodiversity and water management carry consequences far beyond the immediate locality.
Stichting IJssellandschap, which manages the site, occupies a pivotal position within these negotiations. The centuries-old land trust stewards a large and varied portfolio of agricultural and ecologically managed land around Deventer. Its work requires it to reconcile long-term environmental objectives with the realities faced by its tenant farmers, navigating systems of regulation and subsidy that can support ecological change while also restricting practical experimentation.
The material for the sculptures was supplied through the work of Gerard Willemsen, an arable farmer and environmental contractor based in Wesepe. Willemsen’s practice connects farming, forestry, landscape maintenance and subsidy-supported environmental work. Hay, stable manure, material cleared from ditches and timber from landscape management circulate through interconnected systems in which the residue of one activity becomes the resource for another.
This practical circularity informed the material logic of the sculptures. The haylage was not selected as a symbolic representation of agriculture. It already belonged to an agricultural and economic cycle. The work temporarily arrested that material, gathering it into sculptural form before allowing it to continue its passage through animals, soil and landscape.
Morison’s research also brought him into conversation with organic farmer Berrie Klein Swormink, whose herd of heritage Brandrode, or Fire Red, cattle grazed the Veenoordskolk. A former agricultural journalist, Klein had converted his family farm to organic methods during the 1990s. His cattle now undertake a form of low-intervention landscape management across dispersed areas of grassland around Deventer.
Rather than being separated from the sculptures, the cattle were understood as participants in their continuing formation. The works were made to be approached, rubbed against, grazed and gradually dismantled. Their material would pass into the bodies of the animals and eventually return to the land. Sculpture became fodder, and monument became mulch.
Klein’s practice also introduced questions of inheritance and continuity. Nearing retirement and without a successor to take on the farm, he embodied both the persistence of intergenerational agricultural knowledge and its increasing precarity. The sculptures stood within this uncertain transmission of land, labour and knowledge from one generation to another.
The forms recalled the traditional hayricks once constructed to store winter fodder. As material was removed, these stacks acquired increasingly individual characters: becoming thin, lopsided, hollowed out or precariously weighted. Morison used this principle as a sculptural method rather than reproducing a specific historical structure. The sculptures were formed around irregular timber supports, with the agricultural material stacked, compressed and pegged into place by hand. Their construction retained the directness of piling, gathering and building with what was available. The process connected the works to both agricultural labour and the basic sculptural act of accumulating matter.
Although monumental in scale, the finished works were never intended to remain intact. Rain darkened their surfaces. Wind loosened their edges. Birds removed material for nesting, while the cattle ate from them and pressed their bodies against them. Each sculpture developed differently according to its position, structure and use.
“The haystacks in the fields slowly changed form over time and each acquired its own character. Morison hopes his sculptures will also change shape.”
Eva Schaap, De Kunstkrant, 2025
Developed from the earlier Reapers, the Veenoordskolk works moved the series more completely into a living material system. At the Sainsbury Centre, agricultural matter had been assembled into temporal portraits of farmers operating at the radical edges of contemporary agriculture. At Orleans House Gallery, the sculptures had been radically reformed in response to a different material and site. Here, they became active components within grazing and land management, entering directly into the cycles they addressed.
Their mutability also carried a quieter refusal of the autonomous monument. They accepted dependency, permeability and change. Boundaries between sculpture and fodder, body and landscape, artwork and agricultural process were allowed to dissolve.
The Ancestors stood as provisional offerings within a highly managed landscape: to the cattle that consumed them, to the people whose work shaped their material, and to the processes that would eventually disperse them. They held together the contradictions of contemporary rural life without attempting to resolve them, marking a landscape in which extraction, care, survival and restitution remain inseparably entangled.
Rather than being separated from the sculptures, the cattle were understood as participants in their continuing formation. The works were made to be approached, rubbed against, grazed and gradually dismantled. Their material would pass into the bodies of the animals and eventually return to the land. Sculpture became fodder, and monument became mulch.
Klein’s practice also introduced questions of inheritance and continuity. Nearing retirement and without a successor to take on the farm, he embodied both the persistence of intergenerational agricultural knowledge and its increasing precarity. The sculptures stood within this uncertain transmission of land, labour and knowledge from one generation to another.
The forms recalled the traditional hayricks once constructed to store winter fodder. As material was removed, these stacks acquired increasingly individual characters: becoming thin, lopsided, hollowed out or precariously weighted. Morison used this principle as a sculptural method rather than reproducing a specific historical structure. The sculptures were formed around irregular timber supports, with the agricultural material stacked, compressed and pegged into place by hand. Their construction retained the directness of piling, gathering and building with what was available. The process connected the works to both agricultural labour and the basic sculptural act of accumulating matter.
Although monumental in scale, the finished works were never intended to remain intact. Rain darkened their surfaces. Wind loosened their edges. Birds removed material for nesting, while the cattle ate from them and pressed their bodies against them. Each sculpture developed differently according to its position, structure and use.
“The haystacks in the fields slowly changed form over time and each acquired its own character. Morison hopes his sculptures will also change shape.”
Eva Schaap, De Kunstkrant, 2025
Developed from the earlier Reapers, the Veenoordskolk works moved the series more completely into a living material system. At the Sainsbury Centre, agricultural matter had been assembled into temporal portraits of farmers operating at the radical edges of contemporary agriculture. At Orleans House Gallery, the sculptures had been radically reformed in response to a different material and site. Here, they became active components within grazing and land management, entering directly into the cycles they addressed.
Their mutability also carried a quieter refusal of the autonomous monument. They accepted dependency, permeability and change. Boundaries between sculpture and fodder, body and landscape, artwork and agricultural process were allowed to dissolve.
The Ancestors stood as provisional offerings within a highly managed landscape: to the cattle that consumed them, to the people whose work shaped their material, and to the processes that would eventually disperse them. They held together the contradictions of contemporary rural life without attempting to resolve them, marking a landscape in which extraction, care, survival and restitution remain inseparably entangled.
Photographers’ credits
Installation images_Ivan Morison
Installation images_Ivan Morison