The Greenhouse

All flowers in the Heterosis collection were visible in the centralised zone, a recreation of London's National Gallery as it may look in a hundred years time, neglected and abandoned and overgrown with vegetation. The tactile physical world supplanted with a new digital manifestation of beauty. 500 years of Europe's finest artworks taken over by organic matter. The questions I’d like to provoke are; where does beauty lie? Is it in the triumph of natural selection to create self-sustaining organic blossoms or in the ability of mankind to create pigment and fashion images of ourselves, our experiences and our environment? Or is the burgeoning digital realm, a potential usurper of the anachronistic tradition of oil on canvas? The main thrust of this project is to create an artwork in a space that exists in a way that is not possible in any other context. The online network that underlies this enterprise facilitates multiple participants necessary to bring it to fruition. This echoes the circulation of knowledge in 17th Century Holland where information and expertise in the areas of natural Science, Art and commerce formed a crucial network in social and intellectual organisation. Tulip mania provides a microcosm of this ‘community of information’. The National Gallery in London was a pioneer of social networking, providing a hub around which citizens could gather and share intelligence. Similarly it transpires that plants have been communicating information unremittingly through underground fungi networks, conveying warnings about impending insect swarms for example. The centralised zone in Heterosis is a tentative step into the burgeoning metaverse, the impending transition into a world of total immersion inside the digital realm. It is of additional interest that the paintings hanging in the National Gallery belong to a culture of cross pollination with a genealogy that can be traced in terms of particular styles appropriated and influences inherited. Certain paintings being obvious ancestors of older traditions, some carrying only discrete traits of painters from previous periods.

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