Edges of Landscape ─ Bas Ketelaars

An artist’s book exploring the representation of nature through a hybrid practice of photography and drawing.

Edges of Landscape is an artist’s book by Dutch artist Bas Ketelaars. The book emerges from his ongoing interest in the problem of representing nature: whether nature is a place, a comprehensive system, or an ideal we carry within ourselves. Always surrounding us yet somehow remaining out of reach, nature appears here as something whose boundary with culture is unstable and uncertain. This question lies at the heart of the work.

Drawing on the legacy of Romanticism, Ketelaars approaches landscape in a highly personal and experiential way. Combining photography and drawing, he creates new images through elements such as distance, space, transparency, density and transformation. By investigating the “space” between the lens and the landscape, he renders visible not only that intervening space but also his own position as maker. The speed and efficiency of photography are set against the slower manual labour of drawing; solitude in nature is translated into solitude in the studio. As part of his recent practice, Ketelaars stayed in Białowieża National Park in Poland, home to one of Europe’s largest remaining primeval forests, where he made sequences of photographs. By slightly shifting small elements or placing filters between camera and subject, he searches for new ways of imaging nature.

Edges of Landscape is the first publication in which Ketelaars fully integrates his own photographic material with drawing. It also includes essays by Associate Professor Helen Westgeest, a specialist in contemporary art history and photographic theory, and Professor Tim Ingold, social anthropologist.

Limited edition of 800 copies.

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Title: Edges of Landscape
Artist: Bas Ketelaars
Publisher: The Eriskay Connection, 2025
Format: Swiss-bound softcover
Size: 220 × 290 mm
Pages: 192
Language: English
Edition: First edition of 800 copies
ISBN: 9789493363205