Botanical Subjects and Their Contexts

cleidi hearn

Botanical images carry layered histories. For centuries, plants have been represented through practices that extracted them from their environments and recontextualised them as knowledge, resource, or ornament. Expeditions, natural histories, acclimatization gardens, and horticultural archives operated across imperial, scientific, and commercial networks in Europe, the Americas, and other regions engaged in global trade. These modes of looking made plants visible, but only by transforming them into objects that could be studied, circulated, or owned.

Because these histories are well understood, contemporary work that engages flora often defaults to one of two strategies. The first reproduces scientific aesthetics—clean lines, classification, and botanical accuracy. The second emphasizes historical injustice—making the plant a vehicle for critique or political narration. Both strategies are valid, yet both risk reducing the plant to a function. In one case, it illustrates; in the other, it testifies. In neither does the plant simply appear.

In recent years, scholars across environmental humanities and science studies have reframed botany as a field shaped by cultural values rather than neutral observation. Historical research has shown that specimen collection, expeditionary drawing, and acclimatization were not only scientific projects but administrative and commercial ones. Recognising this does not require reenacting those histories in contemporary art. It simply means understanding that botanical images carry residual structures of classification and possession.

There is an alternative to both reproduction and critique: allowing botanical subjects to be present without being required to perform. This approach does not ignore the histories attached to plants, nor does it deny the ecological or economic roles they occupy. Instead, it withholds interpretation long enough for the plant to register as form, duration, and being. The emphasis shifts from what the plant means to how it appears, and from what it signifies to how it is encountered.

This position reflects a move toward relational and post-humanist thinking, where living beings are seen as participants rather than symbols or resources. In this context, the viewer is not asked to interpret or empathize but to pay attention. The plant is not a metaphor or emblem. It is a subject with structure, rhythm, and time. Meaning, if it appears, is subsequent to recognition.

Avoiding narrative spectacle also plays a role here. Ecological and post-colonial themes often enter contemporary art through dramatic scale, archival accumulation, or explicit moral framing. These methods create impact, but they can overshadow the quiet problem at hand: how one looks. When the aim is to redirect perception rather than to stage critique, small gestures may be more disruptive than grand ones. Withholding explanation can create more space for thinking than providing it.

This approach acknowledges context without making it the focus. It trusts that historical, ecological, and cultural dimensions are already present, even when unspoken. Nothing is solved or redeemed, and nothing is illustrated. The plant remains legible as a living form rather than as a vehicle for discourse. Such clarity is not emptiness. It is a refusal to collapse the subject into function.

To engage botanical subjects in this way is to treat them neither as specimens nor as symbols, but as beings encountered in their own right. It asks what becomes visible when the plant is not made to perform for science, for narrative, or for politics. Attention becomes the primary method, and presence the primary outcome.