Nature & Nurture

A botanist-turned-artist in South Africa's Cape Winelands creates lifelike insects using decayed and preserved natural materials he forages

A butterfly's antenna is club-shaped with a long shaft and a bulb at the point. The end of the style of an African protea flower happens to look identical. For Botanical Artist Chris van Niekerk, his work is all about finding these examples of similitude in nature. Using leaves, seeds and other plant materials, Chris combines and assembles them, metamorphosing his foraged finds into insect forms.

'I call my insects 'ecoskeletons'; it's a wordplay on the exoskeleton of a beetle, explains Chris. In his studio, the walls are crawling with his 'insects' - from scorpions to green-winged butterflies all handmade, through Chris's creative vision.

One, a wild-looking bee with a downy abdomen, Chris expounds, has a lifelike striped abdomen made from individual grass seeds he placed with precision over many hours to mimic delicate body hairs. Next to it, a butterfly has wings fashioned from pressed leaves - the pulp removed to expose the veins to resemble the structure of a wing.

Sometimes, the materials he chooses will dictate the artwork, says Chris, referring to the butterfly with its leafy green wings. They began life as magnolia leaves, which Chris processed to remove the pulp, leaving the fine veins of the leaf exposed like a carcass, only to find a second life as a wing on one of Chris's ecoskeltons. It also works the other way around, where I make a drawing of the insect, breaking it down into its components, and then I look for materials to create it, he explains.