Camden Art Centre, London From intricate drawings to movies that branch unexpectedly, this show in the all-pervasive impact associated with plant kingdom on peoples imagery brims with a few ideas, but requires pruning
Some ideas simply just take root … The Mind that is botanical at Art Centre. Photograph: Rob Harris
C licking and clattering, whistling, whirring and churring, composer David Tudor’s 1968 evocation of this rainforest (composed to come with a party by Merce Cunningham) fills the atmosphere, while you climb the stairs to enter The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre. The Botanical Mind intimates some overarching, secret cosmic order that is never quite revealed with more than a hundred exhibits, dating from 15th-century Italy to post-lockdown London, and encompassing cosmological maps and mandalas from Gujarat and Rajasthan, photographs of algae, automatic writings, mossy stones and a minimalist plank. If the cosmos does get you, n’t plant cleverness will.
Viewing F Percy Smith’s quick 1930 black colored and white film The Strangler, we come across a convulvulus looking about, finding a flax plant then twining across the stem. I will be troubled by this tendril that is blindly questing it pursuit of its next victim. If We linger too much time next to the lovely Philip Taaffe monoprints nearby it may try it out within my leg. Smith, a wonderful British naturalist and pioneer of micro and time-lapse cinematography, killed himself in 1945, and it is among the numerous wondering and interesting numbers in this usually fascinating event. Continue reading
