All The Sunflowers is a hand-cut book and paper sculpture, which functions as an experiment in erasure and appropriation as well an investigation into the potential of the sculptural qualities of a book and the possibility of a book to take on unexpected new life forms.

It’s also an experiment into the potential of copies of copies. Vincent van Gogh’s seven sunflowers paintings made in Arles from 1888-1889, which include three copies of two originals, are collated in book form where each faces a page illustrated by a single colour picked from the opposite artwork. The reproduced paintings were subsequently attacked by scalpel, the paintings and the book itself being vandalised. Every flower head was cut out, all the sunflowers gone.

In their layered, collaborative form the modified paintings reproduced on the pages of a book, have become three-dimensional and sculptural, each image visually dependent on the others. Fixed to the wall, the hollowed out pages create shadow flowers from which new lumen prints are made working with sunlight and disused black and white darkroom paper. 

The book and a shadow lumen print were included in the 2021 solo show The Spots That Never Went at Photofusion, London, as part of a triptych responding to the 1980s AIDS crisis, loss and remembrance.

The artwork of the 2021 All The Sunflowers book was featured on the cover of the Book Arts Newsletter No.149 November 2022. 
 
A set of seven postcards, also called All The Sunflowers was published in 2025 and shows photographs taken in 2025 of two editions of the 2021 book intertwined back to front, creating additional interpretations of the sunflowers works, here bringing to the foreground unique colours picked from each of the seven sunflowers paintings. Launched at Brighton Art Book Fair, 6-7 December 2025, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton.

Available from Negative Press at https://www.neg-press.com/product/all-the-sunflowers-roelof-bakker

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All The Sunflowers, handcut artist’s book, 210mm x 280mm, 14pp, edition of 7, 2021.

All the Sunflowers, postcard set in handmade paper sleeve with sunflowers reproduction to inner and a single colour picked from one sunflowers painting to exterior. Edition of 20 in multiple colour sleeves. Published 6 December 2025.