About

Botanica Brasilis is a contemporary textile art studio grounded in sustained observation of plants that inhabit Brazil’s living landscapes. Working exclusively on linen, the practice approaches plants as presences rather than motifs, allowing time, material behaviour, and close looking to shape each work.

Linen functions as both surface and collaborator. Its agricultural origin and absorptive fibres record duration, labour, and hesitation, drawing pigment into the weave rather than holding it on top. Images settle slowly within the cloth and remain provisional, embedded rather than fixed.

Works take the form of hanging scrolls — lengths of linen suspended from wooden dowels — a format that preserves tactile vulnerability and direct encounter. The scale is intimate and bodily, encouraging proximity and sustained attention rather than spectacle.

Repetition operates as a discipline of perception. The same plant may be returned to across multiple works, not to stabilise a single image, but to meet it again under different conditions of light, season, and time. No depiction is treated as definitive. Each remains singular and incomplete.

The studio avoids illustration, symbolism, and narrative explanation. Meaning is not prescribed but allowed to emerge through duration and material presence. The work does not interpret plants; it creates the conditions in which they can be encountered without use or extraction.

Botanica Brasilis was founded by Cleidi Hearn, a Brazilian-born artist based in Cork, Ireland. It is sustained as a long-term practice grounded in slow observation, material discipline, and continuity. Rooted in Brazil’s landscapes, the studio approaches plants through attention and relationship rather than classification.

At its core, the practice seeks not to produce representations of plants, but to structure encounters — spaces in which plants, often overlooked or instrumentalised, can stand whole and unclaimed.