elaborate – Flora Dorian

week 1

tangible object- book form. cut up book *‘plants’* (same as in pre-elaborate) book, to randomize the illustrations and text. changes the idea of language in this context.

digital- random selection book. exploring language use and what cropping and elimination does to the form of the book. choosing select phrases from the iteration above

re-organising the text and then selecting passages to create this paragraph allowed for a new way of looking at the work. “are about indirect love” directed my thinking towards plant metaphor and how an innate understanding of plants supersedes the language. plants seem inexplicably tied up in the way we see and understand ourselves and the world.

“The tree is an emblem of complexity, growth and proliferation as much as a model for an object composed of a centre and branches in the case of the neuron, and an object with a ‘stem’ and ‘bark’ as in the case of the brain as a whole” – Baylee Brits, Brain Trees

what is a tree?

*“it is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have.”* john berger- ways of seeing

sun tracking cube, light travels east to west

sun tracking cube, light travels east to west, human size mechanical sunflowers move with the light, you are invited to stand amongst them.

in greek mythology the sunflower is used as a metaphor / allegory for love. these initial sketches are a proposal for a ‘sun tracking’ room to respond to how sunflowers track the sun from east to west. the idea is to walk in on the south side of this cube and inside the walls are moving daylight lights to emulate the sun rising and setting from east to west. to continue my investigation into the human disconnect with nature i think it’s important to use man-made objects to parody the natural world, in the same way we use language. i am interested to see how people would respond to this cube.

WEEK 2

“in dystopian sci-fi, we figure the loss of plants as the end of all hope, and the miraculous growth of plants in hostile environs as hope’s beginning” – spores from space, tessa laird (p.63)

carrying on from my previous proposal i have taken this quote from tessa laird’s essay spores from space and used the format of a book to start a conversation about it. in the beginning there is the end and in the end there is the beginning are the phrased i used to star this work. sketching two plants for the beginning page and the end page i have used white to black, blank pages throughout the book.

going down one of the paths the book took me on, i made these drawings, inspired by children’s illustrations, particularly those from the little prince. these drawings take the plant as hope metaphor quite literally.

I chose to use animation and continue on from the previous drawings. i wanted a continuous loop of movement to expand the metaphor. i made one with and without text to simultaneously explore how the words affect the video and whether text is necessary.

prints to be printed on seed paper which means that you can plant them. a way of giving back to the earth.

Botanical Metaphor in a human centred world

why in a human centred world full of machines and invisible infrastructure do we still look to plant language and botanical metaphor.

I will be using illustration, animation, text and project proposals to explore botanical metaphor and the understanding of plants that seems to supersede our language, questioning the disconnect between humans and the natural world. This disconnect is apparent simply walking down the street, phones, airpods, tablets, vapes, we don’t look to nature in our everyday, we look at technology, yet our language is tied up with plants language. I want to interrogate this by questioning the form of plants and language that accompanies them.

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