Plants and the ethics of attention

cleidi hearn

The way a culture sees plants reflects how it understands the non-human world. Plants are visible yet frequently overlooked, present yet rarely acknowledged. They remain backgrounds in images, margins in architecture, or instruments in agriculture. Their presence is assumed rather than considered.

Within these conditions, the decision to work exclusively with plants that live within Brazil’s ecological and cultural landscapes is not an act of national symbolism or ecological display. It is a structural choice that alters how plants enter perception and how attention is directed.

For centuries, these plants have been observed through extractive systems: expeditions, plantations, acclimatisation programmes, and manuals concerned with yield and utility. Such frameworks made plants legible as resources while rarely recognising them as subjects. In this context, a sustained, exclusive focus becomes a reversal of that logic. The plant appears without needing to serve as commodity, specimen, or spectacle. It stands within its own duration, morphology, and presence. The viewer meets it through perception rather than use.

Serial engagement deepens this shift. Plants that live within Brazil’s landscapes provide conditions for repetition and slow observation because their transformations are gradual and precise. A single plant may move through early shoots, mature stems, weathered leaves, and dormancy. These changes resist drama. They do not deliver the visual events contemporary culture tends to reward. Instead, they offer subtle modulations of tone, density, and structure. Repetition becomes a way of training perception rather than producing novelty.

This approach raises a broader question: how do plants appear when they are not explained, interpreted, or assigned a role? The answer involves restraint. Narrative is withheld. Symbolism is not imposed. The plant is not made to represent identity, ideology, or loss. Context remains present but unstaged. Viewers may bring their own histories or associations, yet nothing in the encounter demands them. Meaning arises through attention rather than instruction.

Focusing on plants rooted in Brazil’s ecological and cultural landscapes also introduces a quiet reflection on how tropical plants have circulated through European and North American imaginaries. Exoticism reduced difference to spectacle. Scientific botany transformed living beings into diagrams and labels. Horticulture imported them as novelties for display. Each mode extracted value—visual, scientific, or financial. Here, another relation is proposed. The plant is presented without theatrical framing. Extraction gives way to recognition. The plant simply stands.

This posture does not attempt to repair history. Repair suggests narrative closure, and plants do not lend themselves to such conclusions. Instead, the work proposes a modest ethical adjustment: to look without taking. Attention itself becomes the gesture. These landscapes carry long histories of cultivation, displacement, and use, yet they also offer forms and rhythms that reward slow looking. Biodiversity becomes something to perceive rather than to exploit.

Material decisions stabilise this position. Linen scrolls create a quiet architecture for encounter. Pigment settles into the fibres, recording time and hesitation. The unframed format resists both monumentality and illustration. Scale remains intimate and bodily. The plant does not become scenery or decoration. It becomes present.

Limiting the field of observation also establishes continuity. Working within a specific ecological and cultural terrain reduces distraction and allows study to accumulate over time. The practice develops as a lineage rather than a sequence of unrelated projects. Attention remains steady. The work grows through return.

In a culture shaped by speed and excess imagery, such restraint may seem rebellious. Yet it answers a broader need to reconsider how we look, how materials behave, and how non-human life appears when nothing is demanded of it. Plants that live within Brazil’s landscapes offer the ground on which this reconsideration can unfold.

They do not need to perform or explain.
They only need to exist.