What he does…
I am artist and I work where art, design, craft and science overlap. I use different processes, approaches and methods from those areas to create a variety of different artworks, which could be anything from books to large format photographs.
Plants and art…
I’ve always worked with plants in different ways. During the 90s I did a lot of work, looking at the cultural appropriation of plants either on fabrics or ceramics. It migrates throughout society in many different ways for different reasons.
I am also a professor of ceramics at Central Saint Martins, which is another story. Ceramics is a part of my practice but only part of it. Ceramics has a huge tradition of using plants as illustration.
The process…
I collect plant samples and put them on a small aluminium stub and then coat them with a microfine layer of platinum or gold. They’re then placed in a scanning electron microscope with a vacuum chamber (not a microscope you look down). The sample is bombarded with electron particles and I get an image on screen. I can move it around and light it in different ways but I’m left with a black and white image. I use my own process to colour the image. A single image can take me a week to do. I refer back to the original colour of the plant to start with but I use different colours to differentiate between various parts and characteristics of plants and use my own artistic sensability. I’m not a botanical illustrator. I play the role of a plant portrait artist.
Becoming an artist…
I grew up in Solihull. It’s a curious place between the industrialheartlands of Birmingham and the natural countryside of Warwickshire, Shakespeare territory. I draw on both of those elements.
My father was involved in engineering so I would go to factories with him and was aware of all the qualities of making. I would visit the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and was aware of pre-Raphaelite paintings. They’re very detailed and strongly coloured. I would also go to the Science Museum there too. Those were very strong influences. I had a big old Victorian microscope which my father gave me. He liked its engineering qualities and thought it would enhance my passion for natural history.
When I left school, I did a foundation course in Solihull. I went there not knowing whether I wanted to do painting or sculpture but they put me in a ceramics workshop so I didn’t have to make the decision. I enjoy discovering new things so I thought it was fantastic.
Then I came down to London to study ceramics at the Central School of Art & Design (as it was called then). But I realised what I liked most was the cultural history rather than the sculptural plasticity of clay. I’m interested in building on and referring to things.
I was teaching in West London in a college in Hounslow when I decided I wanted to make the switch. It was a time of Dutch elm disease and there were lots of elm trees being cut down. There were blocks of wood lying in the road so I stuffed my car with wood, brought it all home and started studying carving. I went through my own sculpture course of making things. Out of that experimentation, which took a couple of years, I made a link with the Whitechapel Gallery and was invited to do an artist’s residency at a school in Dalston Junction. It snowballed from there.
The new era…
About ten years ago I felt like I’d gone as far as I could commenting retrospectively on plants and felt that I should be using new technologies. I’d been looking into science and imaging in science so I wrote a round robin letter to all the heads at Kew Gardens.
Only one person responded – Madeleine Harley who was Head of Research into Pollen and had an earlier career as an interior designer. As a result of her experience, she had a good awareness of the visual nature of the material she was working with.
She’d wanted to do an exhibition of her images but the priority of research left no time and Kew didn’t feel there’d be public interest in an exhibition of scientific images. I was a Trojan horse in a way. We met and started looking at each other’s work. She started using electro-microscopes so we could magnify a single pollen grain 2000-3000 times. They’re fantastic ornamental structures. My work is decorative with strong colours and strong form. I am interested in ornaments, pattern and motif so they were amazing forms to work with. When Madeleine first showed me the magnified images I thought they were phenomenally small and amazingly detailed and I wanted to share them with people.
Bookmaking…
When we started working on our first book together, Madeleine was very insistent that it should be a book that her peers couldn’t find fault with so it had to be scientifically accurate. And I followed a similar route artistically and critically. I also tried not to be the artist who goes in and raids the cookie jar. I’ve tried to learn the science as much as I can. The response from scientists has been very positive.
I started focusing on my work at Kew and developed a number of exhibitions of the work I was developing on pollen. The book we created, Pollen, the hidden sexuality of flowers, was difficult to get published at first.
Publishers said the images were beautiful but they weren’t sure who would buy it and which category it would fall into in the book shops –photography, gardening, etc.
Then we found a publisher who said they’d try it but they weren’t confident it would do well. They thought it would sell a few copies. But it did really well and it’s now on its third edition.
Since then I’ve done a book with Wolfgang Stuppy, a seed morphologist at Millennium Seed Bank who approached me to do a book with him, Seeds, time capsules of life. Then another book with him, Fruit, edible, inedible, incredible. The seed book is in its second edition. There’s a German translation and the French translation is due out soon. The books have won prizes because they’re unique, visually interesting and come with accurate scientific text in a readable style, which is quite unusual.
Projects…
I developed a project for Grizedale Forest in the Lake District, which was the first forest to have artists working in it using living materials. I collected pollen from different flowers in the forest, took them down to Kew, photographed them on the microscopes, blew up the images and used them as prints on a dinner service in 2001.
Next to where I was working was Brantwood House, which was John Ruskin’s house. He was a Victorian philosopher, writer, artist and champion of Turner. I got access to his archives at Lancaster University. I found his writing about wayside flowers and used small fragments of this text like little titles on the dinner service. I made about 120 pieces and each place setting was dedicated to a particular flower.
I devised a banquet which was held on top on of the hills overlooking Lake Constant, in September. It was a fairly high-risk strategy, knowing what the Lake District is like in terms of rainy weather.
I invited 11 other people who were linked to the project in some way. Everyone had to contribute to the meal. The beekeeper brought honey. The herbalist brought mosquito repellent. The director of The Wordsworth Trust did a poetry reading. There were lots of different people all coming together. I didn’t really know all of them and they didn’t all know each other either.
All the food came from the forest. There were seven or eight courses from various sources from the forest. There was wood pigeon and venison. The trout came from the lake. We had an amazing meal that started at 6pm and went on until 11. It became a metaphor of cross-pollination and, although quite a private event, became very well known as a piece of work. News of it filtered out and from that I got a fellowship from NESTA to develop further work at Kew. And it took me out of the teaching that I was doing.
Variety…
My wife’s Greek and we go to Greece quite regularly. A lot of material in my projects come from Greece. One of the last projects I did was on Ruskin and Goethe. They were very knowledgeable and interested in plants. They both did the grand tour over the Alps and collected plant specimens. Every year we drive down to Greece and do the same route.
I collect samples in a conventional way and using the car. Every car has a pollen filter.
I did a project in Oxford for a three day sound event and had different sound artists and musicians working around the botanical gardens at night. I did a piece for the Davidia tree, which is known as the handkerchief tree.
When I came back from Greece I took samples from the pollen filter and printed images from that onto silk handkerchiefs, which were hung from the Davidia tree.
In Greece, I have a friend who has about 70 beehives so when we went collecting honey, I recorded the sound of bees in the hives. Interestingly, the frames that they collect honey in are the same shape and size as a car’s pollen filter. It’s an interesting metaphor so I brought a beehive back with me, installed it in the tree in Oxford and used it to broadcast the sound of the bees. The result is that people were attracted to the tree by the sound of the bees and then discovered the printed handkerchiefs.
Encouragement…
There was a family friend who lived down the road who was a commercial artist/graphic artist when I was growing up. He worked for a company in Birmingham and got me a summer job working in their production department, making models and operating machines. As a 16 year old, it was a really great experience. Later, he gave up his job to become a full-time painter (with four kids, living in Solihull). I learned from him in a quiet, subtle way.
Agalis is a fantasitc support and probably has more knowledge about plants than I do so we have a shared interest there.
In the late 80s or early 90s, I did a proposal for a forestry commission in Devon. It nearly went through but didn’t. I was pretty cheesed off at the time. Then about 18 months or a year later, an almost identical piece of work was done by chance, by another artist. That made me realise I should have just been more persistent. It was a good wake up call.
My manager, through my fellowship from NESTA, was the one who thought about setting up a book deal and told me I needed to do it within six months. That’s what I need from time to time. That was a good push.
Advice
If you’ve got an idea you need to say you’re going to do it. It’s more powerful saying you’re going to do something. That gives it more
authority.
Luck vs hard work…
There is always an element of luck but you’ve got to recognise the opportunity when it arises. I have been very lucky but ten years ago you wouldn’t have predicted where these interests would have taken me. I’ve always kept working. That’s one thing I always do. The push for research at universities is huge. This year I was supposed to do a research proposal that I’ve been putting off, mainly because writing is a very painful and slow process for me. I am much better at creating objects and images than speaking. But in the modern game, you have to be able to develop the right language to attract things you want. In the end a much better project than I could ever have dreamed of was offered to me without all the hassle of writing an application.
The future…
I teach ceramics at Central Saint Martin’s. It’s a part-time post, two days a week. The opportunities available to me right now are huge and I need to balance my role at the college with my research, partly because I am a professor there but partly because ceramics is an endangered subject.
Then there’s all my collaborative work and managing all the various projects, which is interesting. My goal is to get work out there. The books are fantastic but I tend to get buried in them.
I need to develop more of a profile for exhibitions too. I suppose all artists would say that their work doesn’t have the profile they’d like it to have. Although my work is recognised, it’s also very hidden.
Collections…
I have a ‘wünder-cabinet’ of curiosities, things I’ve picked up en-route to different places. I’ve been collecting more books than anything else in the last few years. One gathers so much stuff, I’m slightly hesitant to collect anything now other than images.
Inspiration…
Everywhere I go inspires me. I could do anything like go for a walk. When I’m in my studio I tend to work flat out. I go to friends’ exhibitions, watch films, go to the countryside. If I’m in Greece, I’ll go windsurfing. If I’m in London, I like to cycle and do other sports to keep fit. I never get enough time to do most of these things but find them all stimulating.
I like sports that seem to have an aesthetic element to them. Like being on top of the Alps is magnificent and I use those sorts of experiences as inspiration, not immediately but they are formative in a sense.
Right now…
I’m in Portugal at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. They have a museum, a gallery and provide lots of sponsorship for cultural, educational, social and scientific projects. The deputy director here liked my work, especially what I did in the Lake District. They want to develop an art and science project for the year of biodiversity so they asked me for advice. I’m based at their Science Institute, working with molecular biologists and working at their botanical gardens. Out of that I will develop imagery and possibly form, with a porcelain manufacturer out here. The end result may well be a banquet of some kind.
Important skills…
Belief, intuition and tenacity. Knowing and developing an awareness of who you are, where you want to be and who you want to work with.
There were only about 16 galleries in London showing contemporary art about 25 years ago. There are more than that now just a few hundred meters from my studio. The world has changed. It’s more competitive but you just have to stick with what you do.
A friend of mine, Adam Reynolds, was severely disabled. I met him when I was teaching an evening class and we started chatting. He said he was planning to open up a gallery and then he did it. He ran it for
17 years with friends and I became one of the helpers. He was a fantastic character. He worked, he did public artworks. He was a great inspiration to me. He never complained about anything and got on with what he wanted to do. There is a bursary in his memory now available
to deaf and disabled artists.
When you have goals…
You’ve got to be persistent and believe that your time will come.
• Images copyright Rob Kesseler, Wolfgang Stuppy & Papadakis Publisher