This section expands on key aspects of the practice, including its relationship to cultivated plants, memory, material, and histories of cultivation.

The questions reflect recurring conversations around the conceptual framework, methods, and materials that shape Botanica Brasilis.

On the Practice

About the Practice

  • Botanica Brasilis is a painting practice centred on cultivated plants and the histories they embody.

    Working with suspended linen scrolls, the practice examines the ways cultivated plants and human societies have shaped one another across generations. The paintings begin with plants remembered from rural Brazil and develop through sustained acts of return, repetition, and recollection.

    While rooted in Brazil, the practice considers cultivated plants whose histories extend far beyond national borders. Through painting and writing, it investigates how histories of cultivation remain present within the plants that continue to accompany everyday life.

  • The practice asks how histories of cultivation remain present within the plants that have been shaped through long relationships with human societies.

    Cultivated plants have influenced patterns of labour, migration, trade, settlement, and daily life for centuries. At the same time, they have themselves been transformed through continuous acts of cultivation.

    Botanica Brasilis examines this reciprocal process and the traces it leaves within both plants and people.

  • Cultivated plants occupy a distinctive position within the practice because they are shaped through sustained relationships with human societies.

    Unlike wild plants, their forms have developed through generations of selection, cultivation, movement, and use. They carry histories of labour, adaptation, exchange, and environmental change that remain present within living forms.

    The practice approaches cultivated plants as material records of these long processes.

  • The practice begins in Brazil because it is through the agricultural landscapes of rural Brazil that its central questions first emerged.

    The paintings originate in remembered plants encountered through everyday life and long familiarity. These recollections provide the starting point for a wider investigation into cultivated plants whose histories extend across continents and generations.

    Brazil remains the point of departure for the practice, grounding broader questions of cultivation and history within lived experience.

Cultivation and History

  • Cultivation has shaped human societies for centuries. Through the cultivation of plants, landscapes have been transformed, settlements established, trade routes developed, and forms of knowledge passed between generations.

    Many cultivated plants remain part of everyday life, yet the histories that shaped them often pass unnoticed. Their forms reflect long processes of selection, movement, adaptation, and labour that continue to influence the present.

    The practice approaches cultivated plants as living forms through which these histories remain visible. By attending to the plants themselves, it becomes possible to consider how cultivation continues to shape both human societies and the environments they inhabit.

  • The paintings emerge through memory instead of direct observation.

    Remembered plants provide the starting point for the work, drawing on long familiarity developed through repeated encounters over time. Memory does not preserve a plant in fixed form. It allows certain details to remain while others shift, disappear, or return differently.

    The paintings develop through this process of recollection, carrying the marks of distance, repetition, and continued return.

  • Cultivated plants are shaped by generations of human intervention. Selection and cultivation alter the plants that continue into the present.

    Sugarcane, for example, cannot be separated from the histories that accompanied its cultivation across the Atlantic world. The plant that exists today emerges from those histories.

    The practice approaches cultivated plants as forms shaped by cultivation over time, considering what those transformations reveal about the relationship between plants and human societies.

  • Painting provides a way of returning to the same plant over time.

    The work is grounded in recollection and sustained familiarity. Through repeated acts of painting, cultivated plants are approached as subjects whose histories unfold gradually, with time.

    The slow accumulation of pigment across linen mirrors the duration that interests the practice itself. Forms emerge through layers, and frequent returns, allowing painting to function as a method of inquiry into the histories carried by cultivated plants.

Method and Material

  • The paintings begin from memory. Direct observation is rarely possible because the plants belong to a landscape experienced at a distance.

    Remembered plants provide the basis for the work. Their forms are reconstructed through familiarity developed over many years rather than from a single image or observation. Some details remain clear, while others change, fade, or reappear differently over time.

    Each painting develops from this process of recollection. Differences between works reflect the shifting nature of memory and the repeated return to the same plant.

  • Cultivation itself depends upon repetition.

    Plants are planted, tended, harvested, and replanted through recurring cycles that unfold across seasons and generations. The practice adopts a similar structure by returning repeatedly to the same cultivated plants.

    Each work records a different encounter with the same subject. Through repetition, forms continue to develop, revealing new relationships between memory, cultivation, and time.

  • Linen is both a material and historical component of the practice.

    Derived from flax, one of the oldest cultivated fibres, it introduces another history of cultivation into the work. Image and support emerge from the same agricultural field, linking the painted plant to a material shaped through centuries of human cultivation.

    Linen also allows the image to develop through successive translucent layers of pigment. The absorbent surface permits forms to emerge gradually, reflecting the slow accumulation and duration that runs throughout the practice.

  • The scroll format allows the linen to remain visible as a material surface.

    Suspended and unstretched, the cloth retains its movement, weight, and textile qualities. The vertical format allows the image to unfold gradually across the length of the linen, maintaining a close relationship with the fabric on which it is painted.

    The scroll also reinforces the relationship between plant, pigment, and fibre. Linen is itself the product of cultivation. Image and support emerge from related agricultural histories, bringing the painted plant and the material on which it appears into the same field of inquiry.

Research and Writing

  • The texts and paintings emerge from the same area of inquiry.

    Both examine cultivated plants and the histories they embody, though they do so through different forms. The paintings investigate these questions through image, material, and repetition. The texts allow certain ideas and observations to be considered through writing.

    Neither functions as an illustration of the other. Together, they form parallel approaches to the same ongoing investigation.

  • Writing provides a space to develop questions that also inform the paintings.

    The practice is concerned with cultivation, memory, material, and history. Some aspects of these subjects emerge through the process of painting, while others benefit from sustained reflection through language.

    The texts extend the research that underpins the practice, allowing ideas to develop alongside the visual work without becoming separate from it.

  • Research forms part of the process through which the work develops.

    It includes the study of cultivated plants and their histories, as well as ongoing reflection through reading, writing, observation, and painting itself. Research does not function as a separate activity that precedes the work. It unfolds through the practice as a whole.

    Painting, writing, and sustained engagement with particular plants each contribute to a long-term investigation into how histories of cultivation remain present within living forms.