South London Botanical Members Talk

How this exhibition came about…

Moved to area 2 years ago- kept walking past and wanting to find out what this place was like inside. I find myself drawn to institutions, museums etc and find I look at collections of things a lot in my artwork. Also the word Botanical triggered many memories for me of childhood excursions to gardens and parks as well as drawing from flowers collected from hedgerows.

One day I cam in and became a member with the intention of practicing my drawing. Immediately the space caused all sorts of responses and I found it filtering into the work I was already making.

January 2009 I received an email to members about the 100-year celebrations and the idea of artist residencies- I emailed to enquire and after an exchange with Roy Vickery the Chairman he invited me to exhibit work … a small test run of having an artist about the place.

So as I said I often find myself drawn to museums, libraries and collections- and their languages of display, which I feel is a reflection on my own propensity to pick things up and hold on to them.

Quote about collecting from introduction to a book on the subject edited by Anthony Shefton for the Horniman museum

…the plenitude of that which is to be collected hastens the need to classify…And if classification is the mirror of collective humanity’s thought and perception, then collection is it’s material embodiment. Collection is classification lived, experienced in three dimensions. The history of collecting is thus the narrative of how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appropriate and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have inherited.

 (Elsner and Cardinal 1994:2)

The disorder of my own collecting habits draws me to these sites of comprehensive groupings and yet I also approach them with in trepidation because I feel overwhelmed by the mass of knowledge and do not know how to approach it….

This may be therefore why I was as inspired by the atmosphere and space of the South London Botanical Institute as much as what it contains.

At the South London Botanical Institute I found two worlds-

An Interior world that was dark and quiet and cool, with books of names and plants pressed between paper held in space and time for future reference.

And then there is an exterior world of light and shadow, things in constant movement, growing, dying and rotting. Things growing where they shouldn’t, foreign species in the wrong borders.

Memory and the Remembered

The contrast between these two worlds, seem to me to represent the dialogue between the remembered and memory i.e. that which we know as universal truth and those things that shift and change in relation to our subjectivity. The Institute is a site for remembering, the named pressed flowers are kept as reference points. It is also a site for memory linked to our encounters with plants and their associations in the outside world.

The Botanist moves between these two worlds testing one against the other.

I found in the pressed archive faded and ghost like presences that no longer belonged to the present. I was interested in how the process of preserving and naming a thing also required an act of destruction and removal from the confusion of the moment. This seemed to be echoed in my use of photography to approach the site of the Botanical Institute.

Memory and Photography

Through the photograph we have found a way of owning the moment and yet like the pressed flower the photograph is always an object of the past, something that has died. As an extension of memory the photograph cannot be trusted. As a fixed mark it is in many ways the opposite of memory, which is forever changing through the moment, viewed as it is from the present. Photographs are a way of editing the world and exist in relation to a gamut of other photographs. They have a power of their own removed from reality and create their own narratives.

I use photographs as another means of collecting, picking up those details that draw the eye. The lens allows me to create order and find a focus. And yet it also assigns the moment of the past- flattens it into a 2-dimensional page, removes texture. 

Working directly onto the photographs; masking, scratching, destroying I attempt to pull the image back into the moment. By loosing clarity I hope to once again find texture and produce something, which is flickering and changeable and can be encountered again and again in a slightly different way.

This process is also a reflection on the shifting and allusive nature of memory viewed through the veil of the present.

Memory and Decoration

‘Wherever any style of ornament commands universal admiration, it will always be found to be in accordance with the laws which regulate the distribution of form in nature.”

“..there is scarcely a people, in however early a stage of civilisation, with whom the desire for ornament is not a strong instinct.”

Quotes from the Grammar of Ornament

The work also has a certain decorative quality, partly I believe due to the subject matter, partly due to the reductive process. This decorative sensation is in some way incidental and some way deliberate.

Whilst researching for this exhibition I read about early German Botanical plates, which over time were traced and retraced by new artists, turning the original drawings into formalised decoration and eventually becoming templates for design and through this process loosing their accuracy to life and worth as Botanical guides. I was interested in the retracing which seemed to echo my own process and also the memory loss that occurred in the transformation of illustration to pattern. Pattern, however, can also be a memory trigger, plants have always been strong motifs in textiles, which are often the textures of our daily lives, the things we wear or sit upon.

Another story that echoed the theme of misinterpreted knowledge through drawing I heard listening to a lecture about Natural History and the Appropriation of the New World by Mauricio Nieto Olarte in relation to an exhibition at the Gasworks gallery. From this lecture I learnt about late 18^th century Spanish collectors expeditions to the new world, bringing back their drawings and pressed plant specimens from South America to be studied, interpreted and named through the botanists art in Spain. The Botanical Illustrator used formulaic compositions and patterns to turn these specimens into plates that could be read and interpreted by the botanist. Often these plates therefore showed a plant in all its seasons and followed artistic rules of composition and design. So although they stood for knowledge in the western world would be of little use for identifying the plant in the wild. Here we see the process of categorisation attempting to own and tame the fearful unknown and yet ignoring the knowledge already owned by those people to whom these plants were the everyday.

In destroying the image to create new meaning I hope to reflect upon the ability to know something by loosing it.

“He who builds to himself a joy

 does the winged life destroy-

 But he who kisses the joy as it

 Flies lives in eternal sunrise.”

William Blake