The Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany

Abstract

This research project considers the urban environment as a valuable site to examine humanity’s relationship to nature, specifically botany, through a visual arts practice. Botany as it is used here is defined as all plant life. The project investigates a fascination with the evidence of humans’ endeavours to contain, control, and manipulate the flora in their urban habitats. The creative works and exegesis speculatively explore the potential of everyday urban encounters with botany to perceive nature as something intrinsic to both the city and ourselves, by considering flora as a tactile, vital cohabitant.Using botany as a metonym for the wider natural world, the creative works are informed by specific contemporary environmental issues, including habitat damage and encroachment, and the effects of waste associated with consumer culture. Urban botanical sites and domesticated plants have informed the drawings, sculpture, and installations that form the studio outcomes. In addition to living plants, two significant groups of materials were used in the creation of the sculptural works. The first are products associated with construction and landscaping, which signify the human intention to alter natural environments. The second are forms of consumer packaging commonly linked to environmental degradation. The creative and theoretical research asserts the vitality of these materials, revealing their potential liveliness in an ecosystem. By highlighting the entanglement of living and non-living entities that make up our urban habitats, the creative works challenge the concept of the ‘natural’ environment as being distant, wild and pure, and unsullied by the presence of humans