Roots and Soil. The Art of the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum - JSTOR Daily. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Visitors encountering the Thousand Bloom Chrysanthemum at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania often wonder what they are seeing. From a distance, the plant appears to be an immense floral dome, composed of hundreds—if not a thousand—of carefully matched chrysanthemums. Each flower occupies its own place in a near-perfect pattern. The blossoms rise in concentric rows from the edge of the display toward its crown, creating an impression of abundance so extravagant that it seems possible only through multiplicity.
If you linger to listen, you’ll hear many guests wondering if multitudes of plants have been assembled to produce this impressive form. Then comes the revelation: every blossom belongs to a single chrysanthemum. Beneath the dome, hundreds of branches converge toward a single stem and root system. Once the final display plant is selected, about a month before exhibition, the work enters its last stage.
Weekly Newsletter. 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. Art as aid in learning science 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. 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. H. G. Heck: Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art. Sowerby's Mineralogy. 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. Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water (1851) — The Public Domain Review. Mat Collishaw’s Petrichor at Kew Gardens is one of the best shows this year. Zachary Corzine's - Synthetic Flowers.
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. Evgenia Emets: Artworks. Council of Seeds, 2022 Portão Vivo / A Living Gate, 2022 Arvore do Mundo, 2021 Eternal Forest Manifesto, 2019 Eternal Forest Manifesto artist's book, 2019 Eternal Forest Sanctuary Experience, 2019 Good Wood, 2018 Eternal Forest artist's book, 2018 Forest Codex (Eternal Forest), 2018 Eternal Forest visual works, 2018 Eternal Forest Film, 2018 Gift of your Heart, 2019 Time Pressure, 2018 Time Pressure, 2017 A Curious Case of Time, 2017 Line is just a Line, 2017 Do we have a common language?
Form of Forms, 2016 Silence, 2016 Mind Matter, 2016 Interrogated Silence, 2016 Minuteglass, 2016 Inter-Connect, 2018 Echo of Now, 2007-present I Am, 2016 The Wheel, 2016 The Wave, 2016. □ Josie Iselin and Jackie Hilderling (The Marine Detective). Amazing intersection of art, science and story-telling. Go see this! Tanya Kovats: Darwin’s Great Tree of Life. Alice Stori Liechtenstein. Over the weekend, Alice Stori Liechtenstein inaugurated the latest edition of her ongoing design exhibition and residency, a project set against the dramatic backdrop of her Austrian castle, Schloss Hollenegg. Titled Walden, this year’s theme invited designers to think about bringing nature back into everyday life. But not the romantic version of it, as Liechtenstein explains: the gritty, wild kind. ‘I wanted to address the environmental crisis,’ says Stori Liechtenstein, the castle’s resident and curator. ‘In the past 18 months there have been some groundbreaking exhibitions on design and ecology, and I felt it was necessary to keep the conversation alive and explore it further.
I find a lot of the current narrative is unnecessarily politicised and guilt-inducing, so I wanted to talk more about nature than the damage we are doing to it, in the hope of reawakening our innate love for the earth.’ Above, The Arch by Crafting Plastics. Schloss Hollenegg for Design Designers in residence. Marianne North: Botanical Mystery Solved. Something about the painting made Tianyi Yu pause. The artwork, depicting tropical plants crowded together in a riot of color, had been painted in 1876 by prolific botanical illustrator Marianne North. The wealthy Victorian woman had traveled the world, usually on her own, documenting in bold oils the plants and landscapes she saw. During a trip to Borneo, North had filled this canvas with plants from a particular spot in the forests of the island’s northwest corner.
The viewer’s eye might be drawn to oblong yellow fruits from one plant, or pink buds from another, or the rounded leaves cascading down one side of the painting, one of them apparently nibbled by an insect. But Yu, a botanical illustrator who was working at London’s Kew Gardens while pursuing a masters degree, was drawn to clusters of berries, some green and unripe but others black or a bold blue.
Critics of the day were often not impressed with North’s paintings, says Kew senior conservator Jonathan Farley. Jill Pflugheber & Steven F. White Microcosms – A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas. Joos van de Plas. Graham Seymour: From fossils to landscapes. How can you reconstruct the vegetation of deep time? One professor has turned to canvas and paint. What would it be like to set foot in the prehistoric world?
What would a stand 380 million years ago dominated by Archaeopteris, the first tree, be like? How would it feel to wander in the shadow of clubmosses that reached tens of metres into the sky? What would not just the plants, but also the landscape look like? Graham Seymour, now retired as an Emeritus Professor of Plant Biotechnology at the University of Nottingham, works to reconstruct the distant past from a studio in his conservatory at the rear of his family home. ‘I wanted to study palaeobotany at University, but because I was afraid that I would not be able to land a job on graduating, I read Agricultural Botany at Reading and became an applied plant scientist.
Graham felt that while a lot of palaeoart was rigorous in its technique, it was frequently just about dinosaurs and lacking attention to the flora. Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg. 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. Megan Singleton's multipart installation in #KernelsOfCulture incl. ANTHOCYANIN, a 2-part paper corn cob visualization of the genetic code. Keg de Souza: Shipping Roots | News & Press | Scottish Art News | Fleming collection. By Greg Thomas, 03.05.2023 Keg de Souza, Blue Haze, 2023. Installation view in Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Photo: Ruth Clark Blowing in the Wind Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots, at Climate House in Edinburgh, uses multi-sensory installations to tell the stories of plants transported around the globe with our colonial ancestors. The heady scent of eucalyptus fills a downstairs gallery at Climate House in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens.
Keg de Souza, Green Hell, 2023. De Souza’s exhibition delves into the histories of various plants with connections to the artist’s current home-country of Australia. Keg de Souza, Fleece Fugitives, 2023. At the heart of this show is de Souza’s meticulous research, distilled into three mind-maps handwritten on bifurcated Perspex sheets that enclose further plant specimens. Keg de Souza, Green Hell, 2023. These are fascinating stories. The Endless Realities of Evelyn Statsinger's Art. Evelyn Statsinger (1927–2016), who was born in Brooklyn and studied at the High School of Music and Art and the Art Students League in New York, and the University of Toledo in Ohio, moved to Chicago in the late 1940s to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
The school’s proximity to the Art Institute of Chicago, and its encyclopedic art collection, was one of the draws for Statsinger, who once said about herself: “I look at everything.” Many writers have commented on Statsinger’s relation to nature in particular. The press release for her current exhibition, Evelyn Statsinger: Currents at GRAY New York gallery (April 8–June 18, 2022), curated by Dan Nadel, opens with this statement: [For] fifteen years, I have intently watched [the] daily life of plants and animals in both the forests and the fields ….
Statsinger, who explored a singular path throughout her career, spent a year in Japan in 1965 (returning again later). Trương Cong Tung Sees History in a Gourd. LOS ANGELES — The small project room that houses Vietnamese artist Trương Công Tùng’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) — his first solo museum show — is dark save for a few lights that are embedded within an installation and two videos: “Dance of the insects” (2020), which is suspended from the ceiling, where insects crawl across a recording of an evening newscast, and “The lost landscape” (2021), a series of close-up shots of the eyes of taxidermied animals from various natural history museums. The taxidermied animals are frozen between states of death and life, stuck between being living creatures and objects of display. Displayed throughout the room is “the state of absence – voices from outside” (2020–ongoing), an installation of gourds that have been connected through a series of plastic tubes, which pass water, dirt, and seeds among the gourds, and visibly entangle with each other.
Gail Wight - Patricia Sweetow Gallery. 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.