Nestled within the leafy folds of Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, Inverleith House’s peaceful gallery space provides a sanctuary-within-a-sanctuary. A place for quiet contemplation and artistic inspiration. Inverleith House’s current exhibition, Silent Archive, open to visitors until mid-May, reaches into the RBGE’s extensive archive to showcase previously sidelined or marginalised voices. It explores artwork from all over the planet and urges viewers to discover a myriad of perspectives from lesser-known artists. Featuring media ranging from photography to textiles, filmmaking to drawing, collage to installations, Silent Archive is an ambitious exhibition which succeeds in providing visitors with insightful and unique artwork considering the complex relationship between humankind and the natural world.
Upon entry, Wendy McMurdo’s striking black and white collaged photographs of the plant life growing inside the RBGE greenhouses greet visitors with images of dreamlike hanging vines, flowering orchids, light reflected on the tip of a leaf. Beginning with depictions of the botanic gardens’ own flora, Silent Archives moves between Scotland, India, Mauritius, Turkey, and beyond. Kolkatan artist Sonia Mehra Chawla’s thought-provoking photography presents humanity’s historic, ongoing symbiotic relationship with ecology, specifically examining the jute manufacturing industry which spans across oceans and continents.
On the other side of the globe, British textile artist Amanda Cobbett’s contribution to the exhibition are her beautifully intricate, lifelike embroidered sculptures of found natural objects. Lichen on bark, fungus, moss, fairytale-like mushrooms: these textured, tactile sculptures bridge the divide between the sculptural and the natural, expressing Cobbett’s deep appreciation and reverence for botanica and its world that we take for granted.
Inverleith House provides a space for the meeting of twelve botanical artists that provide visitors with a plethora of narratives and ideas regarding flora and botanica. Drawing from history and looking toward an uncertain environmental future, the RBGE’s archive is rich with potential and possibility. Visitors are encouraged to consider their own bonds with the natural world, urged, perhaps, to shed an anthropocentric worldview and instead immerse themselves in the endlessly resilient and generative realm of plantlife.
“Inverleith House (_K5B8067)” by [Ross] is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.