Plant Scenery of the World
Inverleith House, Edinburgh
29/07 – 29/10/2017
Plant Scenery of the World
Inverleith House, Edinburgh
29/07 – 29/10/2017
Laura Aldridge, Charlie Billingham, Bobby Niven, Oliver Osborne, Ben Rivers
With botanical paintings by Işık Güner, Jacqui Pestell and Sharon Tingey and artworks by R. K. Greville from the collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Inverleith House and the Front Range Glasshouses (Lower Temperate Lands)
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Plant Scenery of the World brings together new and commissioned works by contemporary artists with archival material and botanical illustration from the collection of the Royal Botanic Garden, on view here for the first time.
This exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of one of the Garden’s most iconic structures, the Front Range Glasshouses. Designed by architects George Pearce and Allan Pendreigh and opened on the 25th October 1967, the Front Range was a pioneering example of Scottish Modernist architecture; its vast glass and steel structure built to house the Garden’s expanding collection of exotic plants from tropical regions around the world.
Plant Scenery focuses on the Garden’s history of building for plants, reflecting on the evolution of glasshouse design from the 18th century to the present day. As such, the gallery space takes inspiration from the varied climatic zones of the Front Range, offering an interconnected series of ‘micro-climates’ in each room of Inverleith House, evoking the theatrical, awe-inspiring, utopian and naturalistic display of plants under glass through the work of living artists.
Considering the glasshouse as a meeting point between culture and nature, the exhibition explores our enduring fascination with tropical plants, and changing attitudes towards exploration, collection, study and display. Central to this is a suite of paintings by the artist-botanist R.K. Greville (1794-1866) from which the exhibition takes its name. Produced by the artist to introduce Victorian audiences to tropical geographies, today these paintings appear as anachronistic and apocryphal visions of the exotic seen through Western eyes; perspectives that have come to shape enduring (mis)understandings of other places.
Greville’s paintings are a valuable document for understanding how others receive the world and as such centralise questions of perception, validity, ideology and acts of looking still relevant to artists and botanists today. Presented here, Oliver Osborne and Laura Aldridge investigate plants through the lens of human culture, demonstrating the ways we use plants as symbols, impressing them with our own values. Charlie Billingham evokes the fervour for exoticism that gripped Britain in the 18th and 19th century, Bobby Niven contemplates the activity of the collector and the function of the archive, and Ben Rivers’ Urth considers false habitats, inhospitable environments and dystopian futures.