Milah van Zuilen (1998, NL) is a visual artist whose practice is focused on the landscape. She is intrigued by the contradiction between the landscape’s complexity and people’s urge to neatly arrange, change, and organize it. Milah van Zuilen is investigating an earth-centric way of looking at it — instead of the anthropocentric, or a human-centric one. She works with real plant material, sculpture and large-scale installations.
A recurring motif in Van Zuilen’s work is the square, a shape that reflects the human perspective, often seen in mapping, taxonomy, and monocultural land management. In her recent projects, Van Zuilen rearranges plant material into squares and grids, referencing structured classification systems while allowing organic matter to subtly resist imposed order.
Her natural collages, constructed from arranged leaves, bark and other organic material, show an almost abstract pattern from a distance, while the textures and veins of the material become visible from up close.
The interplay between structure and spontaneity, grid-like order and organic form, is at the core of her practice. Van Zuilen advocates for the idea that no system—whether artistic, scientific, or territorial—can fully contain the shifting, living complexity of a landscape.