Artwork
Amazon Florae (interpretations)
Lucy + Jorge Orta, 2009-2010
- Ref: 5514
- Materials: Mixed media: various textiles, buttons, cord, webbing
- Dimensions: Mural: 250 x 250 cm
- Exhibition history: 2010 Natural History Museum London
- Concept: This playful mural of sculptural, handcrafted flowers is inspired by plants photographed during the journey to the rainforest. Back in their studios, Lucy + Jorge Orta created a subjective and personalised florilegium, a collection of floral interpretations.
Flowers are central to our well-being through medicinal and culinary uses, their beauty and their poetic and cultural values. Scientists examine their underlying genetic diversity and explore them for human technological development. The urge to fathom nature and its wealth of plants has inspired countless variations of floral elements in architecture and the visual arts across cultures. Plants have been lovingly
studied and depicted through traditional draughtsmanship or innovative techniques such as Mary Delany’s paper cuts in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth-century glass flowers by father and son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.
