Felieke van der Leest (born in the Dutch town of Emmen in 1968) crochets and
knits the most unusual ornaments. Her brooches, necklaces and rings are
actually little animals in disguise - plastic animals of all types and sizes.
Entire herds populate her studio, from where they roam into the wide world
when Felieke van der Leest has given them a new identity. Colourful, cheerful
and amusing.
Van der Leest, who first trained as a goldsmith in Schoonhoven (Netherlands),
rediscovered the arts of crocheting and knitting during the following years
when she learned how to work with precious metals at the Rietveld Academy in
Amsterdam. With her crochet hooks and knitting needles she creates imaginative
and highly unusual ornaments which are exhibited and sold all over the world.
Her magical touch lies in her unconventional combination of techniques and
materials, but above all in the natural way in which she presents the curious
products of her imagination as though they were creatures of our everyday
world.
Her ornaments are a beastly feast in the most literal sense. Under her hands,
a string of tiny lions evolves into a Cowboy Cubs Necklace, with the lions
sporting miniature golden crocheted hats and spurs and a festive collar of
golden beads. Their leader strolls ahead and can be worn as a brooch. A
plastic giraffe is mercilessly decapitated, his head brimming over with
giraffe eggs on a green bed. Felieke’s crocheted creation is a work of
minuscule precision. The nest can be lifted from the neck and worn as a brooch
on a sunny spring day. Felieke van der Leest presents her Freddie the emperor
penguin as a cool rapper with a heavy gold chain round his neck and sparkling
diamond beady eyes, dresses a tree frog in knickerbockers, gives her Count
Dracula tiger gold vampire teeth and crochets a pink cat lady with chicken’s
legs. A flamingo she turns into an aeroplane ring with its own runway. Some of
her creations are monumental works of art, such as her epoxy resin water flea
chandelier, conceived as a “ceiling brooch” made up of duckweed and eleven
enormous water fleas that keep changing colour. This chandelier she made
especially for the Child Welfare Council’s new office building. Sometimes she
makes tiny sculptures, such as the necklace-like ornament Lassie Elasmo, an
Elasmosaurus from a distant past washed up on DSM’s chalk coastline, where it
will remain until 23 May.
Felieke van der Leest produces her ornaments in small series of at most eight
works. Her works are included in the collections of the International Museum
of Applied Arts in Turin, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Montreal, the
Modern Art Museum in Arnhem (Netherlands), the Dutch Textile Museum in Tilburg
and the Frog Museum in The Hague (Netherlands). In 2001 she was nominated for
the Rotterdam Design Award.
