Back to the Garden

As part of the Aspex programme, artist Tracey Bush will be exploring large scale botanical artworks during a month-long residency.

Gardening suggests an outdoor space where human ideology constructs a ‘natural’ landscape. I live and work in Gosport, an area with an extraordinary number of disused heritage Industrial buildings, and an SSSI shingle beach. Many of these areas are colonised by adventive wild plants. I have documented plants from these areas to use as models for my contemporary botanical art, which aims to re-enchant these ‘weeds’, and invite them back into a future garden.

I refer to my own herbarium specimens to make templates for hand-drawn plant silhouettes: these are collaged with hundreds of fragments of found materials, branded paper packaging -the detritus of consumerism. The collage technique I use is hand-cut with embroidery scissors, and follows my knowledge of the history of botanicals and herbariums which were often the territory of anonymous women artists.

During my residency at Aspex Gallery, I will be working on huge sheets of handmade papers from Khadi Papers India, made from offcuts of cotton rag used in the garment industry. These are the largest rag papers made anywhere in the world. I will be working on these papers using spray paints, which reference the liminal, uneasy urban spaces where I have collected my plants. As an older woman artist, I hope to subvert the street art machismo legacy of spray painting by utilising pressed flowers as stencils.

No hierarchy was applied to my collection of wild plants; adventive, ruderal species were all depicted with equal weight. My intention is to re-enchant the ‘weeds’ of the new wild, revitalising degraded landscapes in a new form of ‘gardening’.

Make an upcycled paper flower and meet the artist – 6pm-9pm (as part of Friday Late)

Supported by the Eaton Fund