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.

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.

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.

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.