Restless nature

Group exhibition of 9 artists who use nature as their source material to decribe the actual or imagined world around them

Lusciousness - flora and the crafted image in a digital environment

The development of digital imaging within science has been as swift as it is impressive, as the images of outer space developed from data sent back from the Hubble Telescope bear witness. However, in a climate where programmes are constantly being developed to facilitate the production of visual spectacle, the ability to retain the trace of the artist's hand within the field of science imaging is a challenging task. Through my collaborations with botanical scientists at Kew over the past eight years I have been keen to move the artistic nature of depicting microscopic plant imagery to a more sophisticated level. Just as the original plant employs colour coded messages to attract an audience of insect collaborators. Through artistic intervention and interpretation I have sought to create mesmeric images and symbolic objects that carry many messages, markers with which we retain contact with the natural world

The power of x2 : a botanical collaboration

Collaborations between artists and scientists might suggest outcomes resulting in a hybrid fusion of cultures with unrealistic expectations of super progeny. However, in reality the outcomes are more subtle, far more diverse, and more widely dispersed than might be imagined - analogous in fact to pollen or seeds, the subjects of my recent collaborations with scientists

A new phytopia

For art to continue this traditional task of making nature aesthetically accessible to a wider public, at least three things are necessary: first, nature requires mediation to an audience because that audience cannot appreciate it unaided; secondly, the art which mediates nature must not be relentlessly formal and abstract in its intentions; thirdly, nature must be available to the artist as a subject to study

Silken Cells

‘Silken Cells’ was a new exhibition of work that wove together the hidden botanical, scientific and cultural threads running through Forty Hall & Estate. This exhibition transforms the Hall with a selection of silk hangings, revealing cellular patterns of sections cut from wild flowers. The parlour table was transformed with a silk cloth printed with microscopic enlargements of its threads embedded with pollen grains collected from flowers in the gardens around the house, the tableware is printed with micro details of wood and leaves collected from the mulberry tree in the grounds. The exhibition has been commissioned by Forty Hall & Estate, Enfield Council and funded by Arts Council England. It is supported by Central Saint Martins, The University of the Arts London, The Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, The Gulbenkian Science Institute Portugal and the Botanic Garden Lisbon. The ceramic plates which are part of the Parlour exhibit have been kindly sponsored by Royal Doulton

Craftsmanship Alone is Not Enough

An exhibition co-curated with Anthony Quinn celebrating a century of ceramics at the Central School of Art and Central Saint Martins. The exhibition featured work drawn from the CSM Museum and Study Collection dating back to the 1940's alongside photographic documentary images from the earliest days of the course in the 1920's. Works loaned from graduates and former lecturers from 1951 till the present formed the largest part of the exhibition. An illustrated publication of the same title was produced to accompany the show with reflections on the course by its graduates and essays by current members of BA Ceramic Design. A programme of events and lectures was developed running alongside the exhibition. In addition a further collection of work was curated for the windows of the Pangolin Gallery in Kings Place to extend the reach of the exhibition. A collection of original glaze samples belonging to Dora Billington, the founder of the course were loaned to the college and have since been donated to the Museum and Study Collection

Plant. Exploring the Botanical World

Plant is a major new publication featuring over 300 works of botanical art. It features one of Rob Kesseler's works, Scabiosa Cretica, a hand coloured micrograph. Kesseler was a member of an international panel of advisors for the book with specific responsibilities for contemporary scientific images for which he also wrote the legends

GENUS: On the imaging of plants

The article explores how botanical art and art inspired by plants have always played a more peripheral role to the grander themes of Western Art. In scientific terms genus refers to a taxonomic classification, but within the wider context of art genus may also refer to typologies and techniques used in the visualization of plants by artists and scientists throughout history. The text draws upon the solo exhibition Genus in which plant drawings were exhibited in relation to historic botanical woodcuts and contemporary images developed using electron microscopy

Worlds Within

'Worlds Within' was a unique collaboration between Rob Kesseler, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation and The Miller Gallery, two venues, at either end of the Carnegie Mellon University campus. The exhibition celebrated the extraordinary aesthetic interrelationships between historically different methods of visually interpreting the wonders of botanical phenomena, which are not readily visible to the naked eye. The graphic impact of historical instructive botanical wall charts was propsed through the juxtaposition with a collection of Kesseler's monumentalized, hand-coloured micrographs of seeds and pollen. Using a selection of newly configured and specially created images the exhibition constructed a remarkable visual bridge between the conventional purpose of scientific illustration as used in educational materials, and the aesthetic interpretation of scientific imagery in contemporary art. At the Hunt Institute the work was shown alongside 19th-century botanical wall charts from Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny’s series Botanische Wandtafeln, restored specifically for the exhibition. Complementing the forms represented in these charts and photographs were a selection of models of marine organisms made of glass in the 19th-century by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and made of glacite in the early 20th-century by Edwin H. Reiber on loan from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The Miller Gallery exhibition featured further juxtaposed pairings and a fuller range of Kesseler's recent micro images. Both sections of this joint exhibition celebrated the extraordinary aesthetic interrelationships between historically different methods of visually interpreting the wonders of botanical phenomena, which are not readily visible to the naked eye. A new video work Like unto each form yet none alike, was specially created for the exhibition. The title of the video is a line taken from the poem The Metamorphosis of Plants by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from his book of the same name. From his investigation into plant form he envisioned a more holistic way of experiencing nature beyond the detached classification of the Linnean system in which plants are experienced both symbolically and scientifically. The movie presents a succession of pollen grains, seeds and plant details that appear in a continuous stream, each fusing with the next, a lineage of “supersensuous archetypes”. On the initiative of Professor Jose Feijo, Prof. of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, Maryland University the work in the exhibition was transferred from its previous venue at Carnegie Mellon University and installed in the atrium of the new Bioscience Research Building at the University of Maryland and also within the department of Cell Biology as a semi permanent loan. Following the reception to celebrate the installation of the work a public lecture, Worlds Within was given, which sought to place my work within the historic precedents for microscopy and micro imaging

Morphogenesis

Morphogenesis is a video sequenced collection of morphological parallels made up of images of micro sections of Portuguese wildflower stems, interspersed with macro images of the original specimen and architectural details observed around Lisbon. This work was shown in a solo exhibition of digital images of micro-plant material at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal, resulting from a fellowship with the Gulbenkian Foundation initiated for the International Year of Biodiversity 2010. The exhibition featured 28 original images