| art.description.project | The exhibition was initiated by the collective of jewellery artists Hnoss Initiative and curated by their members Åsa Christensson and Mona Wallström. The project was realized in collaboration with the Gothenburg Botanical Garden. The invited jewellery artists, all with a connection to Gothenburg, were Sofia Bankeström, Staffan Jonsson, Li Liang and Sanna Wallgren. They created new works inspired by the Botanical Garden and especially the green house. I was invited to both create own work with the same prerequisites and to even interpret the other artworks with a photographic method of my choice.
Since four years ago I hade been working with cameraless photography, which allows me to show works that are true to scale and shape, but not necessarily true to appearance. The images are unique, both negatives and positives at once and can show transparency of objects in various degree. They can even be used to go back to the original objects to show and register changes over time.
I chose to work with plants in the green house that either have a considerable impact on the environment, and still are very common as sources of products for our everyday life and one that has been brought to the brink of extinction by human impact. Those were the banana tree, musa acuminata, coffee, coffea arabica, cane sugar, saccharum officinarum, cotton, gossypium barbadense, African rice, oryza glaberimma in the first category. The sixth plant was the Easter Island tree, sophora toromiro, which has been extincted in the wild by logging and sheep farming and exists only in the green house in Gothenburg.
Working with the jewellery artists I collaborated with those who were in town, translating their pieces to two-dimensional photograms, in some cases combining them with other objects or parts of plants. Sofia Bankeström even chose to combine her brooch featuring teeth with one of my photograms of the Easter Island tree – the teeth referring to the sheep which strip the islands of vegetation, creating a new photogram after the first one had been transferred to a negative.
The work was shown in an exhibition at the gallery Floras Rike on the premises of the botanical garden. Due to pandemic circumstances all workshops and presentations around the exhibition, that lasted from April 10th to May 9th, hade to be canceled. | en_US |
