One of my favourite sculptors is Janet Laurence.

Kimberley botanical

Janet recently went to Australia’s Kimberley and brought back some plants and is making sculptures from them.  Here’s Janet’s description and some photos of her work.

“The great majority of Australian plants and animals are found nowhere else on earth. They are precious repositories of unique genes and evolutionary strategies living in unique ecosystems and, as Tim Flannery has said, they provide Australians with the best means of engaging nature and listening to our land. However, although we profess to love our wildlife, political and economic compromise allow it to be traded off.

Kimberley botanical

My work for years has been an exploration of our relationship to our natural environment. It has taken many forms and taken me to many places. I have recently been visiting fragile environments and attempting, through my art, to bring awareness and attention to such places.

I visited the Kimberley in North Western Australia with the intention of making this exhibition Plants Eye View. This vast ancient geological landscape with its dramatic seasonal changes from its wet season to its dry season is quite an overwhelming experience. I found myself against this backdrop focusing intimately on the extraordinary diversity of plant life there.

Like a plein air artist I set about recording what I was seeing in experimental ways. Rather than depict pictorially, I wanted to set out the plants in ways that expose their ecological relationships.

Back in my studio I’m attempting to capture the memory of my encounter with these plants to create more of an evocation than a description. My work hovers between the scientific and the experiential, between what is known and what is felt.

Generally, the desire in my work has been to create spaces of perception that bring us in contact with the life world. Looking at plants enables us to read the state of the environment and opens up in us a sense of wonder at both their miraculous abilities and their beauty.

Michael Pollan suggests that it was “the flower that first ushered the idea of beauty into the world- the moment, long ago, when floral attraction emerged as an evolutionary strategy”. This micro view, juxtaposed against the huge landscape is what has engaged me for this exhibition.

I am attempting to bring these fragile environmental concerns into art, calling upon perception and memory, to create fugitive spaces of immersion and reflection, transparency and translucency, through a language of veiling which creates a slow space and ambiguity. Plants Eye View continues to ask questions and hopefully brings us in touch with a need to care for the natural world.”

Go the plants, go our eyes and our lovely, generous Earth,

M