The 2015 exhibition of art colective Tropism in the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. I was showing images from the series Spaces and Walking around trees here, plus two installlations with Poet Jan Baeke: Ramifications and Essential Tagge. The two installations are part of our long running Facts & Figures project, see the page "Harde Cijfers" on our website Public Thought (in Dutch).
More about Photosynthesis at:
https://www.tropism.eu/photosynthesis.html
From the press release:
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is pleased to announce a new exhibition ‘Photosynthesis: Shedding New Light on Plants’ opening at the John Hope Gateway on Saturday 20 June. On display for the first time in the UK, the exhibition will be comprised of close to 100 artworks by artists belonging to the Dutch art collective Tropism. Using unusual, often scientific, visualisation techniques, the artists have created new depictions of plants that blur the lines between art and science as well as fact and fiction.
Taking the phenomenon of Tropism (the growth or turning movement of a biological organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus) as a starting point, the exhibition explores how artworks can play the role of stimulus, influencing and heightening viewer’s perceptions. The use of x-ray, pin-hole, electron-microscope and infra-red photography subverts usual assumptions and hints at the growing prominence of technology in the natural world. In a reverse scenario, the installation ‘Facts and Figures’, a collaboration between artist Alfred Marseille and poet Jan Baeke, casts the exhibition viewer into the role of the stimulus: their movements will directly influence the form of the artwork.
The installation extends from the John Hope Gateway to the Garden’s glasshouses, in which viewers can discover objects and sound recordings from the archive of the renowned taxonomist Bob Tagge. Largely forgotten today, Tagge devoted his life to order, sequences and numbers. His archives reflect not only on the life of one man, but more generally on the modern day fascination with numerical systems.
The exhibition was made possible by grants from Stichting Stokroos, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Royal Microscopic Society and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Botanische Vereniging.
