MANDY BONNELL | emmahilleagle. Mandy Bonnell was born in the UK in 1957, and trained at Gloucester College of Art and the Royal College of Art, where she attained an MA in Printmaking in 1983. Bonnell specialises in drawing and print, and in the early 1990’s helped establish a self-sustaining print workshop in Lamu, Kenya, with the support of the British Council. For the last seven years she has researched traditions in botanicals and herbariums whilst on various residencies in the US (at the Albers Foundation, in 2009 and 2014, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 2013).
Her unique boxed collections of drawings, collages and botanical samples, and editioned artist’s books, were featured in a major exhibition Of Green Leaf Bird and Flower at the Yale Center for British Art in 2014. Bonnell has had 14 solo exhibitions to date, including the RaMoma, Museum of Modern Art, Nairobi and four shows with the Eagle Gallery. Eagle Gallery associated artist Artist’s website. Mandy Barker's Cyanotypes Revive a Pioneering Botanist's Book to Warn About Synthetic Debris — Colossal.
“In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rock pool that changed my life,” artist Mandy Barker says. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.” Barker is known for her photographic practice that takes a deep dive into marine debris. Her work has been featured in publications like National Geographic, The Guardian, VOGUE, and many more. Often collaborating with scientists to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the earth’s oceans, she eloquently highlights its harmful impacts on marine habitats, wildlife, and all of us who depend on the ocean for sustenance.
Forthcoming from GOST Books, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections surveys the unexpected and out-of-place along British shores. Barker hopes to raise awareness of the damaging effects of fast fashion, synthetic clothing, and the increasing amounts of microfibers in the oceans. The Unlikely Muse of Soil. Subscribe to our newsletter Success! Your account was created and you’re signed in.Please visit My Account to verify and manage your account. An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.
LONDON — Spotlit in the dark historic vaults of Somerset House, Jo Pearl’s “Oddkin” (2024), a theater of delicate alien creatures that visualizes the microorganisms in healthy earth, is dramatically interwoven with its own shadows. Crafted from clay — fundamentally, a form of mud — Pearl’s work strives to help us overcome our widespread squeamishness about soil, particularly in cities, where we prefer it to be out of sight and out of mind.
As Pearl’s installation suggests, soil is a highly complex mesh of plant matter, fungi, and bacteria working to recycle and regenerate the living earth. Other works explore the emotional and cultural associations of soil, which has long been a metaphor for home and heritage. Christel Lagas. Technology and Nature Merge in Zachary Corzine's Otherworldly 'Faux Flora' — Colossal. Fantastical flowers burgeon and bloom in the digital animations of Zachary Corzine. The Portland, Oregon-based generative designer takes what he describes as a variety of software like Cinema4D, Houdini, Substance, Octane, Redshift, and After Effects to create dynamic, atmospheric visuals. Between projects for clients like Apple, Audi, Disney, Nike, and many more, Corzine explores new techniques and effects in projects like Faux Flora.
Taking inspiration from real botanicals like sunflowers, pincushions, lilacs, and more, he animates each specimen as if recording a timelapse, embracing an otherworldly geometry. “This series was a year-long passion project, driven by my desire to explore hyper-realized flowers that exist in a space where nature and technology entwine in a delicate, algorithmic dance,” Corzine says.
Each specimen is flawless and unfurls with a slightly uncanny polish. Explore more on Corzine’s website, Vimeo, and Behance. Sam Van Aken. In London, an Enormous Exhibition of 500+ Works Roots Out the Creative Seeds of Flowers — Colossal. In nature, flowers serve as an essential component of the reproduction process.
But for humans, scented blooms are ripe with myriad meanings and symbolism that transcend their biological functions. During Victorian times, offering a bouquet to someone with your right hand indicated a non-verbal “yes,” while a yellow carnation would reject an admirer. Similarly in art history, wilting flowers rendered as a momento mori remind us of death’s inevitability, and for van Gogh, sunflowers were the perfect stand-in for gratitude. A massive exhibition opening next month at Saatchi Gallery cultivates a vast repertoire of works that explores how blooms have become an omnipresent entity in human life and creativity.
Anchoring the exhibition is an expansive and immersive work of 100,000-plus dried flowers by Rebecca Louise Law. Opening in time to usher in spring in London, Flowers runs from February 12 to May 5. Roots and Soil. An Enormous Fractured Acorn Seeds Meditation Among the Trees — Colossal. In a lush, wooded pocket in Rouen, France, a meditation space rests on the forest floor. Designed by Linfeng Zhou of Vancouver-based LFZ Studio, “Le Monde dans un Gland,” or “The World in an Acorn,” invites visitors into its shell to have a seat and reflect. Diamond-shaped, interlocking panels of marine plywood nest together to create the scaled cupule of the nut, which allows light to pierce through and cast dappled sun spots around the interior. The entrance mimics a crack in the shell before the root appears, which asks visitors “to step inside and embrace the perspective of an awakening tree.”
Set atop concrete blocks and lined with weather-resistant materials, the immersive acorn is designed to withstand the wet, rainy climate without disrupting the forest ecosystem. Utilizing minimal nails and screws emphasizes a more natural building approach that relies on perfectly cut interlocking components rather than additional hardware. Find more from LFZ Studio on its website. Alexandria Douziech. Botanical Hues: Empowering Health Through Natural Dye Research - Collections Connections Communities. Two Artists Seek Out the Ancient Wisdom of Trees. This is not a paywall You can keep reading for free! At Hyperallergic, we strive to make art more inclusive, so you’ll never hit a paywall when reading our articles. But, as an independent publication, we rely on readers like you to keep our high-quality coverage free and accessible.
Please consider joining us as a member to support independent journalism. Already a member? Sign in here. LOS ANGELES — Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology at the Skirball Cultural Center is a mind-bending installation and learning library by the Bay Area artist duo Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg. At the core of installation stands “Tree of Knowledge,” a sculpture crafted from a tree that is rugged on one side in the manner of an Ursula von Rydingsvard artwork.
The wall sculpture “If We Lose Ourselves” recounts the various ways knowledge has been presented and stored through the ages. (18) Sachs Museum at Missouri Botanical Garden on X: "Genes do what? Maize kernel colors inform as well as delight! Megan Singleton's multipart installation in #KernelsOfCulture incl. ANTHOCYANIN, a 2-part paper corn cob visualization of the genetic code. Art and science at the Natural History Museum, London. Artists and scientists have been inspired by the natural world for centuries.
Images capture nature in ways that complement the words and data of science. Illustrations and paintings give instantly understandable and memorable pictures that communicate something of their subject’s essential nature. The Museum's collections contain up to half a million artworks, including extensive collections from eighteenth and nineteenth artists and illustrators. But contemporary artists are still engaged with the Museum and its 80 million specimens, giving its collections and its ways of working new and unexpected lives. NHM Art-Science interest group The Natural History Museum Art-Science interest group is a forum for interesting talks and provocations, aimed at exploring the history and potential for interactions between science and the arts.
Although the NHM is primarily a scientific institution, there is much exciting art-science work going on. Working with our collections. Plant memories: How people build lasting connections with plants. People often fail to recognize and appreciate the importance of plants, a phenomenon known as Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD), also known as plant blindness. This lack of awareness has a negative impact on botanical knowledge and skill acquisitions, consequently affecting biodiversity conservation efforts. McGinn et al. investigated the relationship between art and plant awareness through an exhibition, “In Memory of Plants,” at the Alternative Kilkenny Arts Festival 2022, using art as a tool to address PAD phenomenon.
The study revealed the importance of art as a tool for reflection and emotional engagement to connect people to plants. Visitors at the exhibition were encouraged to share their personal plant-related memories, and plants were seen to link people to significant experiences and relationships. The Mora tree of Guiana | The Linnean Society. This month's Treasure is an intriguing watercolour of a Mora tree, submitted with a paper read at a meeting of the Society in 1838, yet never published. Published on 3rd May 2024 Included in the Domestic Archives recently catalogued at the Linnean Society are manuscripts that were submitted to be read at meetings of the Society: a collection entitled Society Papers (SP). Having had its reading at a meeting, each paper would be commented upon by the Fellows in attendance, and, if deemed worthy, would thereafter be published in the Society’s journals; in the early nineteenth century, chosen papers would be published in the Transactions of the Linnean Society of London.
Often, such papers would be accompanied by specimens and illustrations. While the specimens have generally disappeared – many of them sold at auction in 1863 – the illustrations have stayed with us. Schomburgk's paper as manuscript (left, 1838) and printed in the Transactions of the Linnean Society (above, 1839) References R.
Divorced or Separated? Naming the Specimens on Display at the Zoologisches and Palaontologisches Museum, Zurich. Written by Richard Crawford, who has just completed a PhD thesis at the University of the Arts London, entitled ‘Re-presenting taxidermy, Contemporary Art interventions in Natural History Museums’. Do people read labels in museums? If they do, what do they learn about the object on view? It has been the custom to use labels to give factual names to the things on display in scientific museum displays, but Art curators have taken a different approach and put titles to works that suggest a particular reading of the artwork.
These may be suggested by the artist. For this work, Damien Hirst famously sawed a cow and a calf in half and exhibited the separate halves in tanks filled with formaldehyde, which he placed apart with sufficient space for a viewer to walk between the two halves of each animal carcass so that they could observe the internal organs of both cow and calf. “Nature and her muse, evolution, [is] a deeply creative force. Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water (1851) — The Public Domain Review. Luiza Teixeira-Costa. ‘It has the smell of the oasis’: how palm husks became prize-winning Moroccan art | Global development. The idea of weaving an artwork from palm husks came to Amina Agueznay during a workshop she was leading in Morocco’s Souss-Massa region, as part of a project with local rug weavers to renovate Tissekmoudine, a ksar, or fortified village.
“The plan was to integrate the palm trees from the oasis in our designs, so I encouraged the women to look around them and use whatever material they could find,” says Agueznay, who this month won the Norval Sovereign African art prize, worth $35,000 (£28,000). “We decided to weave with what, in the Berber language, the women call talefdamt [palm husk],” Agueznay recalls. “We deconstructed it to create a thread that we could use.” The winning work, Portal #1, is reminiscent of a jagged-edge motif found on Moroccan rugs and inspired by the symbols painted on the doors of a ksar.
The architect turned artist, who is known for collaborating with rural craftworkers and documenting their designs and traditions, says she feels “blessed” by the win. Frank Walter: Artist, Gardener, Radical - Garden Museum. Walter’s vast oeuvre reveals an intellectual curiosity explored in a wide array of mediums and subject matters, including painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture; exploring landscapes and memory, flora and fauna, Antiguan society, scientific concepts, and more.
In total, he created over 5,000 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 600 sculptures, 2,000 photographs, 468 hours of recordings, and a 50,000-page archive. Aside from his artistic output, Frank Walter led a pioneering and unique life as an environmentalist, intellectual, and philosopher. He self-titled himself the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook, and as a direct descendant of both enslaved persons and plantation owners, he tried to find peace in returning to agriculture as a way of feeding his countrymen who had experienced economic hardship.
In 1993 he designed and built a home, art studio, and gardens in a remote location on Bailey’s Hill in Antigua. Supporters. Mat Collishaw: Petrichor, Kew Gardens, review | Culture Whisper. Mat Collishaw: Petrichor, Kew Gardens, review 5 Mat Collishaw: Petrichor, Kew Gardens, review Tabish Khan Bowerbirds perform their elaborate courtship dances, hummingbirds sip nectar from flowers, and flowers open and close in a sculpture by Mat Collishaw.
However, it’s all an optical illusion created by the sculpture spinning and the strobe lighting - the zoetrope may be a Victorian invention but in Collishaw’s hands it creates an artwork that’s mesmerising. It’s this mixture of old and new technology to showcase nature that can be found throughout the artist’s technically and visually impressive exhibition at Kew Gardens. This confluence is visible in works where he’s recreated Albrecht Dürer’s 16th-century watercolours as digital works where stems and leaves sway in a gentle breeze, in one case so subtly that it could easily be missed and mistaken for a work on paper. The largest work in the show is a projection of a skeletal outline of a massive tree.
Chase prairie: "Want some native ecosystem art for your walls? I've made a hobby of collecting Robert F. Eschenfeldt's Illinois DNR posters and I wanted to share the ones I do have so more people can see his beautiful art. Download full resolution ones fo. Sachs Museum at Missouri Botanical Garden on X: "#ThisEarthenDoor is inspired by the work of American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), her poetry and her herbarium book, started when she was 14. The artists created anthotypes using examples of the plants.
RESISTANT HERBARIUM / ROSA LUXEMBURG - Home. Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science - Society for the Social Studies of Science. Getting in the mood for #BSLS2023 with a visit to the microbiome exhibition @TheBotanics in Edinburgh. GOING WITH THE FLOW: ART, ACTIONS, AND WESTERN WATERS. SITE Santa Fe presents GOING WITH THE FLOW: ART, ACTIONS, AND WESTERN WATERS, a new group exhibition of artists and collectives based in the Southwestern United States. Exploring the role of water in the arid Southwest during the current extreme droughts, participating artists engage the institution’s indoor gallery spaces and locations across Santa Fe with temporary artworks, interventions, community collaboration, talks, and performances.
“There Must Be Other Names For The River,” an ongoing collaborative artwork by Jessica Zeglin, Dylan McLaughlin, and Marisa Demarco, aims to build relationships between viewers and the Rio Grande by combining a visual representation of streamflow data, sound, and performance. It reaches beyond the gallery walls with a site-specific sound installation in the Railyard Park and a live choral performance at SITE Santa Fe on July 29.
Curated by Brandee Caoba and Lucy R. To learn more, visit sitesantafe.org. Work – carole papion. Just a few of the many treasures from the Uncommon Beauty - Objects of Curiosity & Wonder exhibition, curated by Verity Pulford @MakersWales #cardiff 1st April - 29th May 2023. Painting the Terrifying Beauty of Abortion-Inducing Flowers. Tree of 40 Fruit – Syracuse, New York - Gastro Obscura. □ GORGEOUS SEAWEEDS □ abound at the Shaw Centre for the #Salish Sea in Sidney BC. □□□ this exhibit by @JosieIselin & Jackie Hilderling (The Marine Detective). Amazing intersection of art, science and story-telling. Go see this!
Botanists’ Art | Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. DNA analysis from ancient statues. Christopher Dresser's paper 'Contributions to Organographic Botany' Plants in The Lion King. Plants and Music: Missouri Botanical Garden. Random Landscapes @tateliverpool. Rooted Beings. Root System Drawings. Ancient Artworks and Saffron’s Origin in Early Greece. Two-sided SciArt Collaboration.
Sowerby's Mineralogy. Thoreausflowers.com. A great example of the value of museum specimens in understanding the impact of the #ClimateEmergency, & the power of art in communicating it. The #botany collection of Henry David #Thoreau provide a baseline for plant communities 150 years ago. All t. Pleistocene to Anthropocene: A Queer, Underwater Wood-Based Triptych – NiCHE. Orchidelirium. Blond and Bieber's algae textile dyes win Lodz Design Festival prize.
Patterson Clark Artist Gives Invasive Plant Species New Life: white mulberry. Mat Collishaw’s Petrichor at Kew Gardens is one of the best shows this year. Sophie Dubosc and Carolina Gonzalez Valencia. Evgenia Emets: Artworks. Pushing Daisies — Megan Gafford. H. G. Heck: Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art. Az Klymuik: A novel seed plant from 136 Ma,
Tanya Kovats: Darwin’s Great Tree of Life. Clara Lacy's Meticulous Graphite Drawings — Colossal. Alice Stori Liechtenstein. Marianne North: Botanical Mystery Solved. In our latest Botanics story, illustrator Carole Papion reflects on her time at the Gardens and her journey with Mycologists and Fungi □ Read the story here. Jill Pflugheber & Steven F. White Microcosms – A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas. Joos van de Plas. Graham Seymour: From fossils to landscapes. Keg de Souza: Shipping Roots | News & Press | Scottish Art News | Fleming collection. The Endless Realities of Evelyn Statsinger's Art. Trương Cong Tung Sees History in a Gourd. Cy Twombly Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin 1990 Exhibition Poster by Cy Twombly (1990) : Print Lithography. Gail Wight - Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Sam Van Aken. Art and Plant Disease: Helen Pennington – A calendar of plant pathology art. - BSPP - The British Society for Plant Pathology.
I'm completely in love with this hand-drawn graphical abstract from a @CurrentBiology article about Marchantia developmental regulators. #Lichen doodles for #BotanicMonday □□ Wageningen University & Research - Image Collections - Wageningen University & Research - Image Collections. One of the important parts of drawing a new species is that you take the time to really look at the specimen and what it really looks like. It’s often during these times that features you hadn’t seen before come to light #WormWednesday #Annelida #Mageloni.