The Garden of Unearthly Delights 2010 – transparencies, digital photographs, acrylic, fresnel lenses (dimensions variable)

This installation began as a series of photographs I made as Artist in Residence at the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Fascinated with the Garden’s collection of seaweeds I searched for a way to bring the beauty of these specimens back into the public view and to restore a sense of how they would have appeared in the oceans before they were flattened, dried and secreted away between sheets of paper in the bowels of the Herbarium.

As I photographed the seaweeds I was struck by how many of them resembled blood vessels, serendipitously reflecting our shared evolutionary history.

Searching for a visual metaphor to demonstrate this connection I superimposed photographs of seaweeds that resembled veins and arteries over images of the human body, referencing the engraving of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer.

Cylinders of seaweeds were designed to resemble specimen jars in a natural history museum.