TRAVELLING PLANTS

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Plants / Migration / Colour / Place

Travelling Plants is an ongoing artistic research into the movement of plants and the relationship between plant, place, colour, matter and analogue photography.

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The project takes the historical connection between Japan and the Netherlands through Nagasaki, Dejima and Leiden as a point of departure. Along these routes travelled not only commodities, but also plants, seeds, botanical knowledge, images, materials and techniques.

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Some plants remained within botanical collections and gardens, while others escaped cultivation, became naturalised or continued to spread within new environments. Their histories are entangled with human movement, trade and changing landscapes, but also with biological processes that continue beyond direct human control.

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The research follows these plants between historical records and their present environments. Rather than asking only where a plant originates, it considers what happens when a plant is displaced, encounters different conditions and becomes part of another landscape.

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Plant-based colour forms another way of approaching these relationships. Colour is not treated simply as an external characteristic of a plant, but as a material presence that emerges and changes in relation to place, soil, light, time and environment.

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Colour is an event.

Through analogue photography, plant material, photographic observation and colour are brought into relation. The plant is therefore not approached solely as something to be represented. Its physical and material properties participate in the formation of the work.

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Travelling Plants brings together different movements across time and place: plants transported through human activity, plants continuing to disperse within new environments, and plants whose histories have become intertwined with the landscapes in which they now grow.

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Florachrome

Since 2013, my research into plant-derived colour has developed through the Florachrome method. Plant colour is applied directly to the gelatin layer of photographic film, where it remains physically present within the photographic object. It exists simultaneously as subject of research, object of observation, integrated material and bearer of meaning, retaining a material connection to the plant and to the specific conditions of place, soil and time in which it grew.

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Rather than functioning solely as a means of producing an image, plant-derived colour becomes part of the image itself. Its continuing transformation through matter, light and time is central to my understanding of colour not as a fixed property, but as an event.