Entwined: Plants in Contemporary Painting

Entwined is curated by artist-curators Judith Tucker (School of Design) and Barbara Howey with Grant Scanlan (Curator at Huddersfield Art Gallery).

The exhibition was supported by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew whose botanists provided another perspective on the artworks in the exhibition.

Dates

Wednesday 9 November 2022 until Saturday 28 January 2023. 

Opening times

Wednesday to Saturday, 11am - 4pm.

Please note Huddersfield Art Gallery is closed Sunday - Tuesday.

Location

Huddersfield Art Gallery
Unit 7, The Piazza Shopping Centre, Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, HD1 2R

The exhibition features artwork by leading British painters, including winners of the John Moores and Contemporary British Painting Prize.

The artists are:

Amanda Ansell, Bryony Benge-Abbott, Hannah Brown, Graham Crowley, Sam Douglas, Michele Fletcher, Barbara Howey, Linda Ingham, Juliette Losq, Paula MacArthur, Iain Nicholls, Joe Packer, Julian Perry, Narbi Price, Harvey Taylor, Helen Thomas, Judith Tucker and Joanna Whittle.

The paintings in this exhibition invite their viewers to look closely at plants. They do this through the widest of ranges of approaches to paint, the selected painters all delight in our extraordinary vegetive world.

This visual feast explores why painting plants matters now, using approaches from lyrical abstraction through to forensic observation of plants in crisis. How might this deep exploration of plants, through paint, help us understand our place in the world now? What does it mean to understand a locale through an intense study of what is growing close at hand?

Of course, there is a provocation to slow down, to give attention to detail and specificity in all the works. This reflects our renewed relation with nature: those places we have come to value so much, where we go to catch our breath and connect to the more-than-human-world.

Some of the paintings’ beauty belies darker and melancholic attributes, plants as symptom of loss, as metaphor for migration, the legacy of colonialism and as a contemporary take on memento-mori.

For this invitation to look slowly and the focus on the specificity and minutiae of plants comes, paradoxically, at a moment of wider global trauma both in terms of the pandemic but also its corollary, global heating and alarming biodiversity loss.

The visual conversation that this exhibition engenders, with its focus on the up-close world of plants will be in dialogue with earlier scientific, aesthetic and design representations of plants.

The works in the show work with and against the rich traditions of the many and various aesthetic traditions of depicting plants, from botanical illustration, to decoration and design, to a reversal and reworking of ideas of landscape painting as immersive rather than a view, and the focus on the fragility of more-than-human life specifically the endangered nature of plant species, is certainly a memento mori, but not just ours.