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Spanish artist Almudena Romero knew from a young age that she loved plants: “I must have been about four or five – my grandmother would call and say, ‘what do you want for your birthday? ‘ And I want to be like an olive tree.”
Now, included in exhibitions in London (at the Saatchi Gallery) and Paris (Albert Khan Museum), she is showing her unique plant-based art that forces viewers to question her hyper-consumption and shows that art can be created in any situation. eco-friendly method.
In her four-chapter series called “The Pigment Change,” instead of developing photos on photographic paper, she prints them directly on plants.
“I just put a negative on top of the leaf and leave it in the sunlight, and then the image is recorded on the leaf,” said Romero. “But I also print on live plants using a digital projector, and the plant photosynthesizes with the light from the projector and records an image.”
In a chapter from that series, called “Family Album,” she spreads water lily seeds on a stretched canvas, and lets them grow in the dark, before projecting the negative onto the water tank.
“The parts that get more light make chlorophyll, so the dark green tones, and the parts that get less light are still yellow, pale,” she said. “[It’s] just like in a photographic darkroom. But instead of having an enlargement, I have a projector, and my watercolor canvas is my photo paper. That’s how I grow photos.”
The chlorophyll process adopted by Almudena in the 90s was popularized by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who projected photographs onto the grass using a negative and light thrown by a projector bulb. Allegedly, the British artists came up with the technique when they noticed a random outline of a ladder thrown on one of their grass installations.
Despite being an innovative process, it was not simple. It required a lot of space and preparation. Later, Artist Binh Danh improved this method by using photosensitive materials from plants, fixing a positive directly into a leaf and allowing sunlight to project the photo onto its surface.
Learn from Plants
Romero, who was raised in Madrid, used to spend holidays on his grandparents’ avocado farm in Valencia, in eastern Spain. The fresh air, picking fruit, and learning from her grandmother about plants during her formative years instilled the eco-conscious values she embraces today.
“When you grow up close to nature, it becomes a very important thing in your life,” she said. “Plants are important to me, partly because of my family’s heritage and as a photographic subject, it’s amazing in quality.”
But she admits that her eco-friendly techniques wouldn’t work for every artist. “It’s a niche because it produces ephemeral pieces, so it’s a lot harder to be financially sustainable when your art is ephemeral, but I think it also depends on how you understand life and what you want to do with your practice,” she explained.
The 38-year-old is not alone in her love of plants. According to a survey published by consumer analytics platform CivicScience, more than 200 million Americans were houseplant owners in 2020. In recent years, Millennials have embraced the “plant parent” craze. , sharing photos and care tips on social media. But for Romero, plants are much more than something to look after: they are beings from which we can learn.
“Plants have been planted [around] for much longer than us on the planet and they managed to do that without causing any extinction,” she said.
Romero points to plants in deserts and arid environments that have evolved strategies that limit reproduction, saying they allow her to better argue that choosing to be childfree is not “unnatural behavior.” “I’m someone who doesn’t want to have children because of climate change,” she explained. “I don’t feel comfortable.”
In her series “The Pigment Change” she questions whether motherhood or parenthood is something “beyond a person’s control” or “a matter of will,” reflecting on plant selective reproduction strategies and opening up a broader consideration of procreation.
In 2020, she won the BMW Residency Award for the project and her work was exhibited at the renowned photography festival Rencontres d’Arles, in France.
It’s not just about what we can learn from plants, though. For the Spanish, we should also consider non-anthropocentric ethics (a philosophical perspective that challenges the idea that people are the most important, emphasizing the value of all living organisms and ecosystems), seeing other species as having their own agendas and intentions.
The artist explained that she sees photoperiodism (the way plants respond and adapt to changes in light during the seasons) as an expression of plants. “Why do we think we only have these abilities as humans?” said Romero. “The problem is our attitude that we think we are very different until science proves otherwise.”
Studies have shown that plants can be more complex than you might think. According to an article published in The Plant Journal, plants like Arabidopsis feel stressed when touched, which inhibits their growth, and in 2019, another research group found that evening primroses respond to the sound of the pollinators.
Now, Romero is working on his next project, which is to be completed by June 2025. Commissioned by the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, the size of the work is planned to be larger than a stadium.
“I am working in farming on the greatest work of photographic art ever produced. We are going to farm the image of 30,000 square meters,” she said.
Romero is collaborating with scientist Nicolas Langlade, with the help of AI, to use genetically different wheat and grass to achieve a color palette rich enough to produce a recognizable image.
The artwork reflects the human relationship with land and plants, our impact on the environment and our interdependence with nature. For Romero, this art-science project is like coming full circle. “It’s a combination of my family’s background because we’re going to farm it,” she said. “I love my passion for plant photography, so I’m really happy about it.”
“Metamorphosis“ showing at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 28 July.
“Nature Vivantes” showing at the Albert Khan Museum, Paris, until December 31.
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