Artist Walkabout: The Secret Life of Plants

Join Prof Isabel Hofmeyr for a walkabout of her exhibition ‘The Secret Life of Plants in the Barnes Road Herbarium’.

The Barnes Road Herbarium, in Brixton, houses the studio where this exhibition was made. A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens, pressed and mounted on sheets of heavy white paper. The technique used is botanical contact printing (also called ecoprinting), in which plant material is tightly bundled with fabric or paper and boiled or steamed, transferring an imprint of the leaf onto the substrate. The biochemistry of leaves is central to this process and affects the way they print, often producing unexpected results. 

Both the herbarium and ecoprinting involve pressed plants to produce forms of botanical illustration, but with a difference.

This exhibition explores and presents imperial technologies of illustration, herbarium sheets and ecoprinting where realistic renditions are disrupted by the secret chemical lives of leaves - revealing the biochemistry of the leaf not visible to the human eye. We witness the death of a leaf in the birth of the image.    

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