Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty.
James Main
Flowers in all their forms and incarnations take central stage in this exhibition.
The Devonshire Collections are at the source of this survey that stems from the rare botanical books and herbaria in the Chatsworth library and extends to the grounds and gardens that mark the Estate’s otherworldly environment.
An important lineage of gardeners and botanists have foraged, planted, conserved and protected an array of specimens at Chatsworth over the past six centuries. Together, they have created what amounts to a living compendium of the natural world that continues to be nurtured today for the future.
Botany has been referred to as the science of beauty, but it is also the study of humanity. The great horticultural mind and engineer Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the 6th Duke of Devonshire from 1826, spoke expressively of the “structure, affinities, and habits of plants and vegetables.” This exhibition encompasses a series of themes that reflect the lure of flowers, of their features and temperaments, and, by association, of the nature of man in all its contrasts and complexities: mythology and magic, still lifes, hunters and gatherers, in place and out of place, sexuality and the senses, beauty and horror, permanence and transience, and flowers as symbols.
There is a surrealist bent in The Gorgeous Nothings which is felt in the choice of artists and objects but also in the parallels and paradoxes of nature that were perceived by the artists who were associated with the Surrealist movement.
The masked silhouettes in Eileen Agar’s Figures in a Garden are at once haunting and seductive, bold yet fleeting, and interchangeably male or female.
The painting is displayed alongside a group of seventeenth-century Delft flower vases assembled by the first Duke during the reign of Mary II, and a dress by contemporary designer Hussein Chalayan that turns the female body into a topiary.
Notions of gender and identity are evoked in Convolvulus, a cold yet compelling still life by gender-nonconforming artist Gluck. Beauty conceals terror in Kapwani Kiwanga’s immersive installation The Marias, which takes over an entire room at Chatsworth.
Reconstructions of the peacock flower as depicted in Suriname by the seventeenth-century botanist Maria Sibylla Merian point to the slavery and persecution of women during colonialism - the plant was considered a natural abortifacient and taken by women who were subjected to forced labour and sexual violence.
There is magic and wit in the room upholstered and decorated by Konstantin Kakanias a floral wallcovering that he produced with the help of members of the San Patrignano community, a rehabilitation centre near Rimini, in Italy.
The exhibition takes its cue from the American poet Emily Dickinson’s habit of composing poems on scraps of paper and used envelopes. The ‘gorgeous nothings’ she refers to in one such poem are vital and existential matter to her.
They are not dissimilar to the specimens of ferns in a nineteenth-century album which will have represented a world unto its own to the specialist who compiled it.
Gathering – to bring together and take in from different places and sources – is an act of preservation and often of survival. This practice is engrained in the history of collecting at Chatsworth and underlies the choice of artists and selection of objects featured in this exhibition.
Specimens of scientific nature, like the remarkable collection of fossils and minerals put together by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, or the over 400 species of British algae catalogued and photographed by Anna Atkins in the 1840’s, find visual echoes in the works of contemporary artists such as Simryn Gill, Elliott Hundley, Liza Lou, Alessandro Piangiamore and Elias Sime.
Modulated surfaces and found items converge on the canvases of ‘scavenger’ painter Frank Bowling, while the sculpture of a regal female figure by Chiara Camoni is composed of myriads of components of botanical elements in clay.
All these artists use forms of cut-out, collage and assemblage in their artistic practices.
The installations presented here evoke the tenacity and focus of ‘gatherers’ – be they scientists, archivists, artists, poets or collectors. They also reflect the resilience and persistence of nature amidst the scourge of the environmental crisis.
Berlin-based artist Ana Prvacki seeks out the endangered yet vital elements of soil and water in a performative and site-specific piece that trails from Flora, the seventeenth-century sculpture by Caius Gabriel Cibber situated in a classical temple outside the house, through to the grounds and greenhouses.
Each flower is associated with deep-rooted and geographically diverse histories and myths. Individually, they may be considered gorgeous nothings, but together, they manifest life and endurance against all odds.
…if we range through the whole territory of nature, and endeavour to extract from each department the rich stores of knowledge and pleasure they respectively contain, we shall not find a more refined or purer source of amusement, or a more interesting and unfailing subject for recreation, than that which the observation and examination of the structure, affinities, and habits of plants and vegetables, afford.
Joseph Paxton
