Wednesday 11th Jan - Saturday 4th Feb 2006
TONY HEYWOOD'S SUPERBOTANICS
TONY HEYWOOD
Superbotanics Bell Jar
2005
23 x 23 x 54 cm
Describing himself as a horticultural installation artist, the range of Tony Heywoods practise is not adequately construed by terms such as garden design or sculpture. Heywoods work ranges from monumental installations covering large areas of land, that use garden as a starting
point, to micro-landscapes grown in Petri dishes.
SUPER BOTANICS, his latest exhibition, features a series of such micro-landscapes. These works incorporate sculpted, painted, and cast objects, sound, asteroid detritus, stone, alongside grown organic matter and bacterial blooms. The closed bell-jar environments provide a spectacle, simultaneously ugly and alluring, possibly toxic, and un-natural in its purpose or status. Laboratorial in their aesthetic, the works have the feeling of a specimen.
These other worlds reference Japanese Sui-Seki, in which stones or rocks become the repository of myth and are intended to present landscape as a cultural as well as natural phenomenon. However as living forms they require attention to remain intact as objects, so without a guardian they will wither, despite the fact that the plant matter, sourced from Madagascar and Borneo, is hardly recognisable as natural or alive.
Heywood has received worldwide recognition as a horticultural designer and has exhibited across Europe. This is his third solo exhibition in London.
Full biographical details and images are available upon request.