Plants as presences
cleidi hearn
Images of plants carry long histories. For centuries, plants have been separated from their environments and recast as knowledge, resource, or ornament. Expeditions, manuals, gardens, and archives made them visible by isolating, naming, and circulating them. In the process, living beings were turned into specimens, commodities, or decoration.
These habits of looking still shape how plants appear today. Contemporary botanical work often follows one of two paths. It either adopts the language of scientific description — precision, classification, accuracy — or it turns the plant into evidence, using it to illustrate ecological or political critique. Both approaches have value, yet both assign the plant a task. It must inform, explain, or testify. It is rarely allowed to simply exist.
Working with plants requires acknowledging these histories without repeating their logic. The aim is not to reproduce scientific imagery or to stage historical argument, but to shift the terms of encounter. Instead of asking what the plant represents, the question becomes how it appears. Instead of what it proves, how it occupies time and space.
This shift begins with restraint. Narrative is reduced. Explanation is withheld. The plant is not framed as symbol or lesson. It is approached as a form with its own structure, rhythm, and duration. Attention moves from interpretation to perception.
Such an approach does not ignore context. Historical, ecological, and economic dimensions remain present. They are simply not performed. The work does not rehearse these conditions or convert them into spectacle. It trusts that they already inhabit the subject. The viewer is given space to recognise them without instruction.
Avoiding spectacle is part of this stance. Large gestures, archival accumulation, or overt moral framing can produce impact, but they often replace looking with conclusion. When the goal is to recalibrate perception, quieter means can be more effective. A small image held close may ask more of the eye than a monumental statement.
Within this framework, the role of the viewer changes. The task is not to decode or judge, but to remain — long enough for subtle differences to register, for time to become visible, for the plant to assert its own pace. Looking becomes slower and more deliberate.
The plant is encountered neither as specimen nor as symbol. It is met as a living presence. Nothing is extracted from it. Nothing is required of it. It stands on its own terms.
Attention becomes the method. Presence becomes the outcome.
