Got lost

In the summer of 2025 I was invited to a private artist studio in Koumi, Japan. During my stay I collaborated with Yoko Enoki on a big new painting, titled Got lost. The photo doesn't do justice to the size, the 5 meter wide canvas is made in a such way as to feel a little bit lost too, in a good way. For this art project we received the support from Claessens Japan, the company distributing the Flemish linen prepared for oil paint. Thank you so much, we are very grateful for your support!

This map on how to get lost in nature and many of the paintings we made during this summer will shown in Koumi Machi Kougen Museum in our exhibition opening in November 2025. 

Here are a few of the paintings we made during our stay:


Got lost.

We got lost. No wifi, no data, only a very simple hand drawn map of the way to the lake. The clouds drift low, thunder rolls over the mountains in Koumi, Japan. Yoko Enoki joined me in these Yatsugatake foothills for an art collaboration. We're painting a map, not with impressions, but from experience. We walk in nature. The map is wrong, technically, because we never got to our destination at the lake. 

We got lost, and walked very far, through farmlands under a blue sky, in the woods on soft brown dried pine needles, we stop for beetles and listen to birds. We missed a turn, or not. Somehow we arrived at the bathhouse just before the clouds broke and the rain obliterated the view. I'm not allowed to enter the bathhouse (tattoos) but the little roof at the entrance was enough cover. This is what I mapped out in the painting. The lake is left as a marker only, becuase we didn't see it.



In nature I'm scared of everything that bites, stings, sucks blood, claws, barks and so on. I do feel appreciation for others. Nature isn't a backdrop. As a queer painter 'agency' is a meaningful concept. In my personal life 'my nature' is an important touchstone for what is sensible.

My paintings  are about what happens in the middle, the weather between us. That's what the map is about. Halfway we meet, between the tree and the window, between the landscape and the house, between us. 



I wanted to paint about the preservation of nature, to urge people to act now. But what can I say when we already know what we need to know? How can I contribute to nature, especially when I am only a visitor in this country and culture? And yet, the sky is one big sky all around the world. It has no borders. I want to paint the view in the mountains, but I can’t, they are too big, too beautiful. I think of climate change, the genocide in Palestine, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, the rising hate towards refugees, the asocial attitudes against queer people, especially trans people. There is so much trouble going on. These problems are man made and affect a multispecies planet. If I were to ask nature, the trees, the water, the bear, the lilies, and others: what would you like to say to human beings? The answer might be: get lost. Some of us would only be lost for a moment, and find our way back by following the sound of water. But not all is lost and we can still do something, because we're in this together and everything matters. 



Koumi, 25 July 2025


This is the text written by Yoko Enoki:


Koumi-note

This was my second time participating with Eline De Clercq on a collaborative work.

For the first one, made at ARCUS in Ibaraki Prefecture, I heard from Eline that she would make a map, and I came prepared with ideas about boundaries and land ownership. However, as I began walking around the town listening to Eline, who teaches gardening at an academy and has a deep knowledge of plants, the Ibaraki Prefecture I knew quickly disappeared. It was when we came across a field of leeks. "Leeks are an ancient vegetable that turned blue to protect itself from the sun," Eline said. "Leeks are blue." It was a sudden paradigm shift. Leeks, which I had always thought of as green, were indeed blue. Since then, I've started calling my walks with Eline botanical walks, and every time I walk with her, something invisible to my eyes appears.

We came to Koumi, a place with beautiful mountains and lakes, cool summers, and few natural disasters. I also heard that the highland vegetables and fruits are fresh and delicious, and there are even hot springs. And it was true. On the second day, I started walking around town and sketching. I couldn't stop tracing the endless layered mountain ridges.




Then, I went on a botanical walk with Eline. First, we visited the garbage collection site. As we walked and talked about how to dispose of food waste, Eline pointed to the edge of the vegetable patch. "This is a wild orchid, and it's rare. The flowers bloom in a spiral," she said, and there, at the tip of her finger, was a tiny flower that looked nothing more than a weed, indeed blooming in a spiral. On another day, Eline noticed a plant in the garden of the house next door where we were staying. It looked very similar to a lily, but it was green and the flowers bloomed at right angles and parallel to the ground. While I was taking photos, Mrs. Kurosawa passed by in a pickup truck and told me that in this area they are called babayuri (official name: Ubayuri, but don't you think that's a bit of a harsh term?), and that they are a type of wildflower that doesn't take root well in other places. This, too, was invisible to my eyes, and I thought it was ugly when I first perceived it. I had only ever recognized flowers as flowers if I saw them in the supermarket. What a foolish sensibility! I decided to paint the orchids and lilies that I hadn't seen; they are large and difficult to see, so that viewers would have the same experience.

While strolling through the impeccably beautiful town, gazing at the mountains, and painting, devastating images of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the destruction of my hometown (Wajima City, Ishikawa Prefecture), came to mind. It seems Eline felt the same way, and when she suggested include a message in our paintings, I agreed without hesitation. For us living today, the meaning of pure art is gradually being lost. I create my work while drawing on new insights, global issues, family issues, conversations with people, and relationships with viewers. I sense a provocative, human vibe from Antwerp in Eline's work and her creative approach, which values process. To deepen my understanding, I pulled out books like "Relational Aesthetics" and skimmed through them. It seems I'm not wrong after all.





Now, since last year, I've been painting landscapes of Wajima City, where my parents live. The town, which was physically destroyed by fire immediately after the earthquake and then flooded, is now being reborn in a completely new form. What I can do now is to depict the drastic changes occurring in a rural town that I thought would never change. I hope that by juxtaposing landscape paintings with vastly different meanings, the relationship between Eline's work and the viewer will become more interesting.

Anyway, Eline and I were in Koumi this summer, and we created this work with the desire to form a close connection with this place. Like us running desperately through the torrential rain in the evenings at Koumi, this work may seem a little comical to an outsider, but it is incredibly serious. Perhaps, it's a testament to my focused work, but even now, even after my stay here, I can still hear the distant thunder of Koumi as evening approaches.

August 9, 2025 Yoko Enoki


In 2025 a collaborative artwork, a map on linen canvas, was made together. Eline and Yoko know each other for more than 20 years, and their friendship inspires an artistic exchange. The middle of the map is dedicated to Palestine, because we can't go on as we used to while a genocide takes place. We also believe that it is time to look at other places in the world where extraction of natural richness leads to hunger, war and suffering. 


The paintings made by Eline in Koumi:

Got Lost, 217 x 500cm (including linen edge), oil on canvas, collaborative painting by Eline De Clercq and Yoko Enoki.

Queer weather today, 70 x 406 cm, oil on canvas

Small paintings A4, oil on canvas mounted on veneer

Small paintings 23 x 31 cm, oil on cotton paper



Queer weather today is a painting about the weather and it is about queer visibility and climate change. The image is inspired by the mountain weather, changing so fast during the day. It is strange weather, queer. But being a lesbian, 'queer' is also meant as a reference to the LGBTQI+ community. Being queer is as natural as the weather, and this painting is in recognition of our community. There is also a looming danger in this painting, the moment is passing and we see the weather turning more and more extreme, as a result of climate change. Queer people also live in a more extreme climate, where hate speech is getting more severe by the day. There will come a time when the next generation will look at us and ask: you knew, what did you do?

This painting is not part of the exhibition in Koumi museum.

Details: 






The small paintings ( canvas A4 + paper 23 x 31 cm) are connected to these other two paintings and are made to let my mind go wandering. They are playful in use of colour, composition, contrast, brush strokes. Much like a musical etude, they are about building up concentration and awareness. A selection:














Homesick Tea Gathering

 On a patchwork of fabrics Kapinga Joséphine Muela Kabeya and I gathered teapots, teacups, and various teas. We sit in the shade of a flowering horse chestnut tree, the white petals falling all around us. Kapinga and I first invented the Homesick Tea Gathering in 2024 to create an artistic event to talk about the empty space left behind by people we miss. It started with a cup of tea, the tea leaves were given by someone who couldn't stay in Belgium because of their visa. The tea, from another culture, conjured a vivid memory of all the times we drank tea together. Now the scent and taste draw an emptiness. We miss people in all kinds of stories, for all kinds of reasons big and small. This moment of sharing tea is about sharing tastes, cultures, stories, poetry, loss, and a deep appreciation of what plants can do to us by adding hot water. This event is as much about culture as it is about nature, bringing us together.

Homesick Tea Gathering event at Zarlardinge for Openbare Werken festival, 9 May 2025.


Homesick Tea Gathering, Zarlardinge, Openbare Werken festival,
Eline De Clercq & Kapinga Joséphine Muela Kabeya




Gesamthof, a trans & lesbian garden 2019 - 2025

2025 is the last year for Gesamthof. We knew this location was temporary before we started to garden and it was still worth it, but now the time has come to end this beautiful garden. With the support of MORPHO and Extra City kunsthal we invite the LGBTQIA+  community to relocate plants to your own gardens.

The trans & lesbian garden in 2024

We see this as an opportunity to get together and garden. The trans & lesbian garden is a home to minorities: plants and insects that are part of the ecology of Borgerhout. During the queer gardening Sundays the wild plants growing in Gesamthof will be taken out of the garden, and shared for a better future. This way the garden can live on in many other gardens. 

Queer gardening Sundays:  

January 26: winter is ideal to move trees and shrubs: Hawthorn, Dog roses, Ferns, Beech, Rowan... 

February 23: some of the trees and shrubs can go, and we can start to dig up early flowers: Snowdrops, Hellebore, Violets, wild garlic, forget-me-not... early winter flowering plants.

March 30: lots of spring flowers will have appeared by now, little Dog violets, lesser Celandine, Crocus, and also early summer flowers appear above ground: Salomon's seal, broad-leaved enchanter's nightshade, Clematis old man's beard, Alchemilla Xantochlora, Paris, Anchusa, Comfry...

April 27: summer plants are not yet flowering, let's move them into new gardens: Galium verum, ragwort, Digitalis, Libertia, Schizostylis coccinea, Thalictrum, and the little pools with waterplants, snails and dragonfly offspring. (in a way we're lucky there are no frogs or newts living in this garden)

May 25: the summer plants are ready to go now, during summer it is too hot and not ideal to move plants. We take a summer break to return in autumn.

September 21: late summer, the very last plants, who have not found a new home by now, can be potted up and given away.

October 26: this Sunday gardening is open for everyone: queer & non-queers, friends, family, neighbours, kin, join us for the last gardening Sunday at the Gesamthof. The remaining plants, the last shrubs and trees that still remain, all will be given away. Also left over garden bits and bobs, garden materials, reusable labels, pieces of string, a lucky charm, a souvenir... everything can go.

The Gesamthof in autumn 2024


Practical:

Entrance is via Extra City, Provinciestraat 112, 2018 Antwerp https://extracitykunsthal.org/

Queer gardening sessions are from 14 - 18h 

There is a garden tour at 15h (about 45 minutes) to highlight the plants growing in this season. 

The garden, plants and tour are free, and entrance is free via kunsthal Extra City. Please mention you'd like to go to the garden at the entrance of kunsthal Extra City.

Nice to know: Extra City organizes a guided tour (for queers and non-queers) on the last Sunday of the month at 14h and you can combine the tours.

When the bar at kunsthal Extra city is closed, tea is provided at the gardening table.

Unfortunately the garden is only accessible via a small staircase (6 steps) and not wheelchair friendly. 

We'll garden in all kinds of weather.

Contact: for more information please contact me at elinewoolpublishing (at) gmail.com 

This program is made with the generous support by Morpho who selected me for a research residency with this garden project. I would like to thank everyone who is helping to make this happen.

The Gesamthof garden has a contemporary gardener's approach to inclusive language: we use porous words, open semantics like patches and rhizomes, we like to communicate collective practices, and our definitions have frayed edges. Nature's playful approach to gender and sexuality is reflected in our language and practices. 

This garden supports minorities, both plants and animals, including humans. This project started as Gesamthof, evolved to lesbian garden and includes trans people with a warm welcome. The words are highlighting practices, not exluding others. In reality we welcome all kinds of species, and use gardening to practice decolonial thinking. 

With decolonialism we express 'to give back the land to whom belongs with this land' in ecology this includes a wide variety of species. It also requests good care & response-ability towards nature and land practices. 


Some photos of the species who are looking to relocate:

Not all the plants are wild, this is a hybrid Epidemium.



The wild plants like some in this photo, are extremely valuable for wild life, interacting with butterflies, caterpillars, moths, bats, birds etc. This garden needs almost no care, wild plants can look after themselves, all year round.

Garlic mustard, here gray at the end of the season, is a larvae food plant for some very nice butterflies, it will self seed throughout the garden at the edge of hedges. 

The Scrophularia auriculata or shoreline figwort, is in symbiosis with wasps and when this plant grows in your garden the attracted wasps will keep the aphid population under control.

Some of the plants are extremely poisonous for human animals, if you have children who would put plants in their mouth you might want to check before bringing these to your garden.

Some plants, like this wild garlic (daslook) are edible and will give you something exciting to taste.

Our plants come from lots of different places, if we still have the label you can take it with you.

We'll also help to determine what kind of soil type / light preferences might work.

Some of the plants in the garden arrived on their own, they are loved and cared for just as for the others, because they are living within the local ecology and support many species.

Some of the plants are very old, like this 20 year old fern who has moved from studio to studio with me, and now is no longer willing to be grown in a pot any more.

The intricate connections between the plants make this garden unique, but new connections can be made, and we hope this garden will live on, beloved by the queer community & friends.



Atelier, portraits and paint

 I'm a painter at heart, and in everything I do, gardening, drawing, writing, photography, ceramics, short film, etc there are aspects of painting at the heart of it. Between my many odd projects I work on a series of queer portraits, painting the lesbian gaze and the way I look at others more than I paint their original nature. The portraits are often unfinished, left deliberately open to the imagination of others. Made in series, only few survive from being painted over and he canvas reused. The series was started many years ago and continues without an end in sight. 

Undoing the usual expectations of painting, I like to play with intuition while painting. A painting can be made in five minutes, it can takes months, it can be very small or very big, it can be finished or a simple sketch like the many oil sketches I made in Japan during my residency at ARCUS in the summer of 2024.

Also during the residency in ARCUS Yoko Enoki and I made a painting together as part of the research. It was the first time I made a collaborative painting, and we both enjoyed the feeling of carefully navigating on the canvas in response to each other's choices of colours and design. This was a very nice experience, a discovery of new possibilities in painting and collaborations with other artists. I hope 2025 will bring more opportunities like this, to further discover painting as a collective effort.

Studio view 2024, oil paintings, portrait series

Oil sketches, ARCUS residency Japan, 2024

Collaborative painting with Yoko Enoki at ARCUS residency,
presentation of the oil paint on linen map of the region, 2024. (photo: Yumiko Fujimoto)


Making Sense, the continued natureculture of gardening

The two-year research project Making Sense continues in 2025 with the joint effort of students, trees, birds, wild plants, fungi and their symbiotic partners as a community garden. We're gardening together. 


Steeped in the literature by Donna Haraway, Anna L; Tsing, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Carson, Derek Jarman, Vinciane Despret and many others we work with books, words, thoughts, images, and more-than-human perspectives as well as shovels, rakes, watering cans, pruning scissors, and other utensils. These are garden utensils for working with nature and thinking with nature, to engage so fully we become gardeners, and let the garden change us as well. It is the garden who makes us into gardeners. 


This research project will continue till September 2025, and it allows me to engage in the history of the garden of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Curiosity leads the way, we experiment with rewilding the lawns and borders while keeping the original character of the garden intact. Please contact me if you would like to know more about this project and the academy garden evolution.


Find out more here: https://elinedc.blogspot.com/p/the-royal-academy-of-antwerp-garden.html


Wild flower patches in autumn, the pompom contains seeds to be dispersed by the wind.

A slightly more messy attitude in gardening expresses the sense of freedom fitting for an academy garden. 

While the garden looks less cared for in autumn, these are the really busy days of seeding and preparing for next year's biodiversity in support of local ecology.