December 06, 2025 - December 20, 2025
54 The Valley Rd, Parktown, Johannesburg
Under Pressure: Botanical Hauntings
The world over, plant specimens gathered for Linnean-inspired herbariums are ‘pressed’, that is, ‘put under pressure’ so that they lie flat in order to comply with standard herbarium sheet requirements. It could be said that they are ‘pressed’ into the service of a scientific, colonial, classifying system.
The prints on this exhibition have also been subjected to varying degrees of pressure as the matrix and paper move through the etching or lithographic press, the force of the pressure belying their fragile subject matter and final materially delicate form.
Ghostly traces of plants from stains or embossing at times rise through the surface of the paper of annotated herbarium sheets. These ghostly traces speak to a future absence, a prescient foreboding. Taping them down, describing and depicting them appears to be a direct response to an anxiety and a recognition that plants are under severe environmental pressure.
Using print (the transfer of one surface onto another) as a starting point, the six artists on this exhibition, respond to the ways that plant life, its presence and absence has haunted their practice and their lives.
