Textiles and medicine have long been intertwined in Dutch artist Marjolein Hessels life. She recalls a sense of curiosity passing the Gerrit Rietveld Academie on her daily walk to VU University where she first studied medicine. Later, while working as a doctor, she also studied for a bachelor's degree at the Rietveld. Today, Hessels finds more similarities than differences between the two fields: “As a physician and artist,” she explains “I am concerned with living organisms.”

In 2019 Hessels began her training in anthroposophical medicine after finding work with western medicine “based too much on protocols rather than person based; and when person based it is usually the male body”. What she now practices is a branch of complementary medicine developed by Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman used by medical doctors who include spiritual insight as an aspect of diagnosis and healing. “When you take out the material you make space for the spirit,” she recalls one her anthroposophy teachers saying – advice she has applied to stitch.

Before she turned her attention to plants, her embroideries drew inspiration from early medical diagrams of the body’s blood vessels. Her first embroidery of a plant, she jokes, required her to buy all the green silk she could possibly find online. Her next step involved “moving away from threads you can buy.” A fortuitous visit to an exhibition of photographic prints by Arja Hop and Peter Svenson coloured with plant dyes prompted her to ask: What if I embroider my plants in their own colours?

Today Hessels harvests the colour for her embroideries from teas created from the same plants she stitches. Rather than the literal colour, the silk colours are “always a surprise”. Popular trees create a beautiful pink; Palms silver. Yellow threads are coloured from white flowers, something she admits is “difficult for the brain to process.” Her harvest comes from local plants, including her mother’s Geranium, or neighbours plants she cares for while they are on holiday.

From organising the plant stems and petals, to soaking the silk threads over several days, rinsing, the inevitable unknotting of skeins and finally winding onto bobbins, she reflects that “every part of this making is me.” In the more abstract works such as Boeket 24 oktober [Bouquet October 24] each bobbin represents a flower from the bouquet; in Paardenbloem [Dandelion] and Fluitenkruid [Cow Parsley] each bobbin captures a plant part: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fluffy seeds.

Recent works refer to detailed schematic root drawings from the 1950s by draftsman Professor Erwin Lichtenegger and Dr Lore Kutchera, paired with familiar plants we see above the soil. Visible and invisible aspects of the plant are brought together: “The scientific drawings of the plants represent the physical world we know and the colours given by the plant represent the non-material world we encounter.”

Cow Parsley was stitched at full-scale. Dandelion at half scale with the silk tulle background soaked in dandelion leaves with ferrous sulphate. (Viewing the extensive 2.5 meters of roots may provide some small comfort to gardeners who find them so difficult to eradicate.) The root system of a storm damaged Elm Tree from the Vondelpark in Amsterdam has provided another subject with colour harvested from the tree and nearby soil to produce a deep purple-brown.

Several decades ago, botanists Elizabeth Schussler and James Wandersee coined the term plant blindness: the inability to notice the variety of local plants growing around us. Hessels refers to the term, hoping her work can instead invite our attention, including her harvest of colour which she sees as the “spirit of the plant”.