This section gathers essays that articulate the thinking behind the practice, addressing perception, material, and the ways plants are seen and represented. These texts shape the studio’s conceptual ground rather than comment on individual works. New essays are published every four weeks.
The margins of attention
This essay considers how contemporary attention is shaped by urgency, incentive and reward, and what becomes perceptible when those pressures recede. It asks how quieter presences slip to the margins of perception, and what changes when looking is no longer driven by demand.
Merleau-Ponty on seeing and perception
Seeing often feels automatic, as if the world simply presents itself ready to be recognised. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues otherwise. In l’œil et l’esprit, he describes vision as a lived relation rather than a neutral recording. We do not observe from a distance. We perceive from within the same space we inhabit.
The problem of the definitive plant image
Plant representation has often relied on the belief that a single image can stand in for a living organism. When depiction shifts from finality toward repetition and material variation, the plant no longer appears as a specimen to be captured. It remains open to time, encounter and continued looking.
Plants and the ethics of attention
By focusing on plants long treated as resource or background within Brazil’s landscapes, the work redirects attention from extraction to recognition. The encounter begins with looking and asks nothing in return.
Attention and the making of meaning
Contemporary images are often expected to clarify themselves at once. Meaning is treated as information to be retrieved. Yet meaning does not sit behind the work as hidden content. It forms through time and attention. When perception slows, significance emerges gradually through the act of remaining.
The ethics of non-extractive looking
The act of looking is never neutral. What happens when plants are not looked at as resources, symbols, or scenery, but simply as themselves? This brief essay proposes a mode of attention that neither consumes nor instructs. Perception becomes an ethical encounter that acknowledges presence without demanding use, meaning, or resolution.
One plant holding another
Linen is not a neutral surface but a plant-derived cloth that holds the trace of another plant, bringing vegetal matter into direct continuity with vegetal life. Pigment settles into fibre, and the image emerges from within the material rather than resting on it.
Plants as presences
For centuries, plants have been treated as specimen, resource, or ornament. This text proposes another relation: to meet them through attention rather than use, and to allow them to stand as living presences in their own right.