Do you know the difference between hay and straw? Or what species are used to create both? Have you wondered how haystacks are made, or know that if hay is not dried properly it can spontaneously combust? Is a hay meadow the same as a grassland meadow? Did you know that when grassland is improved …
I am a large format film photographer combining the use of 4×5″ transparency film with botanical specimen. I use a 1960’s Tachihara camera made of cherry wood. The camera, much like my collection of plants, is all deliberate, a slow and contemplative process, but in the end a rewarding and tangible result. I am creating …
If you ever visit the Maltese islands, you may be surprised by the sheer quantity of alien plants covering this small country – with Prickly Pear, Opuntia ficus-indica, one of the most invasive. Yet the problem with an alien is, they can be just so darn exotic, and spell-bounding, hence the need to photograph them at every turn. This Agave ‘egg’ above a …
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was said to be 5 feet 3 inches tall, so that gives you an idea as to the size of this plant. Height is just one of the impressive features of plants from the Agave group. Their large basal rosettes of thick, fleshy sculpted leaves ending in a sharp point, plus a …
Photographer Simon Alibert says he ‘doesn’t know a lot about plants‘ but he clearly sees plants everywhere, and captures their interactions in a way that makes us see them too. He also says he’s an ‘amateur photographer’ which we would disagree with, because he has produced many series of impactful artworks – which is more …
With 350,000 flowering plants in the world, plus all the mosses and liverworts, there is an infinite variety of form for artists to render. Yet most of the representations we see, tend to be focused on the flower, and the showiest ones at that; while it’s easy to appreciate a stunning wisteria cascading down a …
At the Horst: Photographer of Style exhibition currently running at the V & A, in among the glamour shots taken for Vogue and House and Garden, you will find a small section of black and white photographs drawn from nature the artist took in 1946. The full extent of these works can be found in Horst’s book Patterns from Nature, Plants …
Tomorrow is the final day to catch two of the current exhibitions running in the bright and airy rooms at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America includes Dillon Marsh’s Assimilation series, three photographs that ask you to consider mysterious natural constructions in the Kalahari Desert. Spasibo, is the title …
In 1999, for their first exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) collaborated on a series of more than one hundred double exposure images of plants. It is reported by the Guggenhiem that “one would shoot an entire roll of film in a suburban rose garden; …
The online Digitalt Museum collects together images from a number of different Swedish museums. It currently has over half a million artworks in the Public Domain and hundreds of thousands more that are free to use with the appropriate Creative Commons licence. A search on ‘träd’ (tree in Swedish), ‘photograph’ and ‘Public Domain’, returns a wonderful collection of black and …