Exhibition review: "The Power of Plants" at Kew Gardens

This is the last review of the the three exhibitions of botanical art which are currently on display at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Citrus decumana
(Flowers and fruit of the Pomelo)
Marianne North (1830-1890)
Marian North Collection,
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

These are:

• The Power of Plants
• Down Under: Contemporary Botanical Artists from Australia and New Zealand
• In Search of Gingers

If you love botanical art you need to allow quite some time to get round all three as there's such a lot to see!

The Power of Plants….
until 26 July, The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art

Tamarindus indica
(fruit and foliage of the Tamarind)
Marianne North (1830-1890)
Marian North Collection,
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Kew's collection of plants from around the world include a large number which have economic value and/or health-giving properties. They're represented in the gardens, in the herbarium and also in thousands of works in Kew's botanical art collection.

What The Power of Plants exhibition does is display a selection of botanical drawings, paintings and illustrations of plants which have either an economic value or have some component which is essential to human well-being - for examples in relation to physical well-being, food and textiles.

The works from Kew's Botanical Art Collection which are included in the exhibition are both historic and contemporary and the exhibition also features plants from all over the world.

Some of the artists are very well known in the botanical art world - such as Ferdinand Bauer, Georg Dionysius Ehret and Marianne North. Other are unknown - for example illustrations from the ‘Company School’. This comprised a number of often unnamed Indian artists who were commissioned to produce illustrations by the merchants and officials of the East India Company.

I've made a note of admiring Ehret's Punica granatum - and having made a note of how we went about it I'm thinking of having a go at developing a contemporary version (I must add pomegranates to my shopping list!)

Other works which I spotted included:

• hand coloured engravings by Sydenham Edwards
• The Bean Painting (Selection of Leguminosae Seeds) by Rachel Pedder Smith while I liked very much indeed. Rachel is another artist who dgraduated from the Royal College of Art having completed their natural hsitory illustration course. She;'s now an MPhil student at the RCA and can be seen at work in this Kew Magazine article (Spring 2008) about the Botanical Artists they commission at work - Making Masterpieces. Her RCA project is Herbaria and natural history collections: can they inspire and be revitalised by contemporary works of art? It seems to me that she's answering her question with her own paintings. (This Herbarium painting gives you a sense of how her work is produced.)
  
• the images derived from composite digital botanical illustration tecniques developed and produced by Niki Simpson. I really like her work and I've met her once at an RHS show of botanical art. You can view a gallery of her digital images on her website.
  

As well as the exhibition, a selection of plants used for health, food and textiles also feature in the summer bedding display in the Palm House Parterre. We also enjoyed seeing examples of various seeds which were in display in one of the glasshouses.

I really recommend an outing to see all three exhibitions if you're a fan of botanical art. I hope the fans in the UK are now thinking about making a visit while those people overseas enjoy the links instead!

Links:

• Exhibition Review - In Search of Gingers
• Exhibition review: Contemporary Australasian Botanical Artists