Research Reviews: Botanical Mind

 Botanical Mind (14th October 2020)

Camden Art Centre’s The Botanical Mind (TBM) exhibition displayed this artist's work above, of detailed botanic studies featuring strange and otherworldly flowers. This work’s depictions have a sense of familiarity, due to some of the flowers being depictions of real flowers, and others greatly resembling them. The work is something that informed some of the presentation seen in earlier works.

The artist featured in TBM utilises minimalistic styles of presentation that help to emphasize/ contribute to the detail of the subject. Though, the use of colour somewhat obscures the contrast of the image, thus the two pieces in the centre stand out the most, though that may also be in part due to their size. But the obscurity that colour adds to depictions of such detail seems to only inhibit the depiction’s capacity for detail, at a distance. Something that the artist does execute very well  in regards to the clarity is the shading of each subject, most of them are clearly distinguishable in shape, and an idea of scale is somewhat aided by their use of shade. Though, the work produced that was influenced by this was weak in this area. In part that came down to inexperience with illustration as well as unfamiliarity with working at such a small scale. 

The show also helped to develop the idea of photomontage, early on, and the crowded and dense images of flowers were something that informed some of the work based on slightly larger compositions of multiple flowers. 

 

The Botanical Mind also showcases a wide variety of pieces that amass texture, colour and shape, something that would communicate some of my own uses of these aspects within collage. Overall size was a part of this, with many of the works contextualising how high detail images look in large format. With much of the feedback given for my own work relating to the size of the composition, these works served as a briefing on how to create larger illustrations. 

In particular, the ‘density’ of detail and its effect on the generated lighting in an image as the subject depicted gets bigger, the overall required density of detail goes up. As well as this, in order to retain the detail, something that causes the images to encourage closer inspection. Something important to the work, it was important to learn early how much work would go into drawing in large formats. With collage playing a big part in the work, as well as marbling, illustrations were naturally transitioned into an aspect of larger pieces.