Dinoflagellate II, in the Garden, 2026
Mixed media
58,5 cm x 38 cm
Artist’s Statement
The work questions the Edenic concept of gardens, teasing out their straddling of artifice and nature, control and abandonment. Through Victorianalia, including convex glass, commercial shop window gilding and botanical illustration, it alludes to the imperial legacy of gardens in our era of climate change.
In appropriating, renaming, redistributing and commodifying biota for imperial power, profit and prestige, plant hunters and colonial botanical gardens, with Kew1 as the empire’s clearing house, paved the way for today’s prize bedding plants – and ecological degradation. This is alluded to not only in the work’s gothic tone, cracks and scuffs but also its mirror surface that reflects its environment.
Against this backdrop, another kind of “gardener” appears on the convex glass and soot-blackened laboratory watch glasses. As the scientific text2 reports, the marine plankton Ornithocercus magnificus “cultivates” cyanobacteria – an advantage that in warming oceans, drives rapid reproduction and vast algal blooms off India’s west coast.
In contrast to the chinchona, rubber and cash crops brought by ship to India, the gothic flowering of this second wave botanical diaspora complicates concepts of cultivation, abundance and the garden idyll.
