Photo by Malle Madsen

Botanical Bodies

Press text

The word botanic derives from the Greek botanē: grass, pasture, fodder: All terms bound as much to grazing and husbandry as to plants themselves. Etymologically the vegetal world was defined by its relation to humans. Ancient Greeks saw plants as having feelings and early botanists described the life cycles of plants through words such as growth, disease and death. Similarly roots “bleed” sap and bearing fruits are described as a “pregnancy”. Botany is therefore not only a science of classification but has always been about the projection and analogy between bodies and plants.

In Botanical Bodies, Anne Marie Ploug examines this projection between human bodies and plants. Both materials and motifs mirror the logic of the botanical body: Her copper plates “lives and breathes”, not only metaphorically, but materially. The human body is everywhere, in her minimal photogravure-works where the surface appears to breathe: subtle shifts in tone echo the liveliness of skin, or a tongue. Motifs such as grapes and weeds are bound to the active act of printmaking: to breathing, to error, to the sensual and material processes that mark the surface. Plants remain bodies, or the bodies become plants: clusters of grapes, weeds, or stems begin to resemble gatherings of human figures.