Non-existent plants
Last seen recently
This project was done for the "Re-make" and "Re-enact" assignments at my
university.
07:02
When we were told to remake something, I immediately thought of a painting
that I did at the end of last semester. School was finishing and my works
were submitted but I just had a vision for a new piece. It is a jungle-like
scenery filled with plants. While drawing it I haven’t been thinking what
or why was happening there. That’s until I spend the next month reading
on “How forests think. Anthropology beyond human.” I was shook.
07:16
I decided to revisit the work, now with more grace and respect towards the
subjects of my view. The plants in the original work were all just randomly
made up by me. I imagined them. But plants that went extinct can be
considered imaginary as well, they only exist on pages of botanical books
and in minds of scholars who studied them. So, I took plants imagined by
me and extinct ones under one umbrella of “non-existent”. And decided to
give them a place to be. My painting is just another page from a botanical
book of “sadly, you can only meet us on paper” plants.
09:38
Botanical book.
This remake also has a messy personal story involved. An ex-girlfriend of my boyfriend was high on mushrooms and made a painting when she was tripping. The painting turned out to be quite creepy to look at, but it stayed on the wall for some time. Until, I decided that I’m going to paint my remake on the back of the canvas. So, this remake to me is a multilayered symbolic entity. Imaginary plants are stored on a backside of a memory of a trip of a girl who I replaced. Blooming, but forever catalogued in this position.
This remake also has a messy personal story involved. An ex-girlfriend of my boyfriend was high on mushrooms and made a painting when she was tripping. The painting turned out to be quite creepy to look at, but it stayed on the wall for some time. Until, I decided that I’m going to paint my remake on the back of the canvas. So, this remake to me is a multilayered symbolic entity. Imaginary plants are stored on a backside of a memory of a trip of a girl who I replaced. Blooming, but forever catalogued in this position.
11:56
Continuing with the topic, I thought about re-enacting a garden. A
garden is as natural as it is artificial – a collection of plants that
are chosen and nurtured by a human.
13:55
I wanted to further ground the project in reality and maybe increase the
playfuless. So, I thought about how I can use public websites to ground
my garden in the online reality.
Truly, nothing proves for things to be true better than a Wikipedia page.
I carefully studied pages of plants of similar status. They tend to be
short, with a brief mentioning of where, when and by whom the plant was
found, like a catalogue of people and plants encountering each other. I
made a Wikipedia page for each plant that I had in my virtual garden.
Clicking on a plant takes you to a Wikipedia page about it.
I am going to keep this one an ongoing project, open for updates.
18:11
Virtual garden of non-existent plants
I sketched plants from the top of my head, imagined them in a brief feeling. Then I went for further research and sketched plants that were declared extinct in 2019. I used hotglue as a tool to bring all of them into a virtual garden, one for you to walk/browse through. In a sense we as a species take many things from existence in the naturally occurring world but we also give life to many things online – spaces, ideas, places – many of them existing in the internet or on an old hard-drive without anyone visiting them anymore. So, I took the plants that we kicked from the real world and gave them a place to bloom in the web. This garden is also a bit playful towards the viewer. I am not making any visual distinction between the plants that I came up against the extinct ones. So, it’s a bit of “see if you can guess which is which” if you have a need to do it at all.
I sketched plants from the top of my head, imagined them in a brief feeling. Then I went for further research and sketched plants that were declared extinct in 2019. I used hotglue as a tool to bring all of them into a virtual garden, one for you to walk/browse through. In a sense we as a species take many things from existence in the naturally occurring world but we also give life to many things online – spaces, ideas, places – many of them existing in the internet or on an old hard-drive without anyone visiting them anymore. So, I took the plants that we kicked from the real world and gave them a place to bloom in the web. This garden is also a bit playful towards the viewer. I am not making any visual distinction between the plants that I came up against the extinct ones. So, it’s a bit of “see if you can guess which is which” if you have a need to do it at all.
11:56