3.31424e+126 : clematis armandii
This work is a collaboration between Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo. It is made up a large scale installation of tiled photographic prints created from a collage of these different clematis: some sourced directly from the ordinal dataset, some from the variety of neural nets the artists used but all retranslated through photographic printing. The artists are inspired by early pioneers in botanical history such as Anna Atkins who recorded through the latest technologies of the time. The print also has an online, equally fragile, counterpart - a digital version that will eventually run through all of the possible different permutations that the piece can be displayed, the exact, impossibly large number that is referenced in the title. In contrast to their individual practices where they can take years to produce a project, their collaborations are rapid and respond to fleeting and transitory phenomena - a particular flower blooming, being in a particular place at a particular time. The artists try to record an impression of it and their experiences. Over the course of the short blooming period the artists documented the plant at different times of the day through different photographic methods, thinking through and questioning whether it is truly possible to document or record a thing.
Process and Research
This piece continues both mine and Sofia's' exploration of recording and exploring the world around us through the plants that we see and our garden. This work is drawn from a large clematis that grows at the bottom of my garden (a gift from the last person who lived in this house, or maybe even the person before that, it is so large and old). It blooms very briefly for a few weeks at the end of March and signals (to me at least) the start of spring. Our genesis piece was made at roughly the same time of year and contains a tiny fragment of this flower (in the bottom right hand corner); this time it is blown up and expanded into a large photographic print and online digital permutations, inverting the techniques of the first work. One of the things that I love about this piece is the materiality of it, and in particular the printing of it onto photographic paper. Two things have happened with it: first, it was raining in Lisbon when it was produced. On many of the pages there are unexpected streaks as the weather at the time of making also becomes incorporated into the work - rain, of course, is the weather of spring. The second thing is how the colours of the prints are changing so rapidly, like a very speeded up version of Slowly Fading Quietly, from pink to yellow to eventually probably fading together. These are experimental works, in all parts of the process, so it feels right that the end results are so unstable.
References and Inspiration
Dissemination
The digital element of the work can be viewed at https://www.331424e126clematisarmandii.xyz/