This section gathers essays that explore the ideas informing Botanica Brasilis. The texts focus on cultivated plants and the histories they carry, considering how cultivation has shaped plants, landscapes, and human societies across generations.
The essays do not respond to individual works. They develop the wider research that informs the practice, extending questions of cultivation, memory, material culture, and ecological change through writing. Together, they form an ongoing body of research that runs alongside the paintings.
Painting as cultivated attention
Painting unfolds like cultivation. Through repeated gestures and sustained attention, plants emerge gradually on linen, their forms settling into the textile over time. The work enacts a dialogue between labour, material, and ecological memory, revealing presence through duration rather than immediacy.
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.
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.