All The Sunflowers, 2025 artist’s book. Three interpretations each showing two editions of the 2021 book intertwined back to front 
All The Sunflowers, 2021, artist’s book
The Spots That Never Went, exhibition view, Photofusion, London 2021
All The Sunflowers, with Vincent van Gogh
Artist’s book, 2021
Postcard set, 2025
All The Sunflowers is a hand-cut book and paper sculpture, which explores the potential sculptural qualities of a book and the possibility of a book to take on unexpected new forms.
Vincent van Gogh’s seven sunflowers paintings made in Arles, 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 artwork. Each flower was subsequently cut out using a scalpel – all the sunflowers gone. In their layered, collaborative hollowed-out form the modified paintings become three-dimensional, each image visually dependent on the others.
Fixed to the wall, the hollowed out pages create shadow flowers from which new lumen prints are created working with sunlight and black and white darkroom paper.
The book and a lumen print were included in the 2021 solo show The Spots That Never Went at Photofusion, London, as part of a triptych responding to personal memories of the 1980s AIDS crisis.
A set of seven postcards was published in 2025 and shows photographs of two editions of the 2021 book intertwined back to front, creating seven new interpretations of the sunflowers works, here bringing to the foreground unique colours picked from each of the seven sunflowers paintings.
Available from Negative Press at https://www.neg-press.com/product/all-the-sunflowers-roelof-bakker
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 December 2025.
All The Sunflowers, handcut artist’s book, 210mm x 280mm, 14pp, edition of 7, 2021.
The artwork of the 2021 All The Sunflowers book was featured on the cover of the Book Arts Newsletter No.149, November 2022.
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