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I wanted to see Matt Collishaw's Petrichor exhibition at Kew Gardens. But to see Matt Collishaw's Petrichor exhibition at Kew Gardens you needed to pay for a visit to Kew Gardens. Which is affordable - if not particularly cheap. You'd definitely need to make a day, or at least an afternoon, out of it to make it worthwhile. So that's what I did.
Heterosis (2023)
I decided to visit Kew in spring so I was lucky that the flowers were coming into bloom (a couple of weeks later and it'd be probably have been even more impressive) and lucky, too, that the rain held off for the most part. There were a couple of light, brief, showers but nothing to ruin what turned out to be a rather lovely day. Collishaw's art was good (and I'll get to that) but it was the trip out to Kew that really made it so pleasant.
I'd taken the Overground to Whitechapel and then the District Line all the way to Kew Gardens. I'd considered Kew Greenhouse for brunch (breakfast really) but the breakfast menu had stopped at noon and it was 12:07 when I arrived. Noticing a Pizza Express, and having had a lateish breakfast, I thought I'd have a bag of crisps and then make myself nice and hungry for a post-Kew pizza. That was a plan that worked well. The crisps were McCoys by the way, flame grilled steak! A grab bag too!
Such gluttony. I'd need to walk it off (which I did, my step count for the day ended up being 26,028) once I got into Kew. After a bit of palaver over tickets at the gate, the friendly staff member let me in and, immediately, I wondered why I'd left it so long since my last visit. If my memory serves me well (and it doesn't always) I'd visited three times before.
In 2012 (Facebook confirms) to do the treetop walkway (I cycled there and back!), in 1999 for Tony and Alex's rather wonderful wedding, and another non-specific date for a general visit. Older now, my fourth visit found me more appreciative of nature than ever so I wandered down to the Palm House by a pretty lake and flanked by Chinese guardian lions, the white greyhound of Richmond, the red dragon of Wales, and the lion of England. Great guys! If I'd been fifty years younger I may have been tempted to go and meet TV legend Bluey who was doing one of his regular meet'n'greets in the Gardens yesterday.
Inside the palm house (divided into arid, temperate, and tropical - toasty even - zones) I enjoyed the big leaves (and the heat). There were banyans, betel nut palms, ebony, peepul (!), giant bamboo, and banana trees. Madagascar periwinkles, tamarinds, rubber, mahogany. But it was the bright red flowers (whose names I didn't catch, much like Robert Smith in the song Catch) that caught my eye and left the longest lasting impression.
From the Palm House, it was a short walk to the Princess of Wales Conservatory. A place where fans of cacti will not be disappointed. Round cacti, short fat cacti, phallic cacti, squat cacti, and even some things that weren't cacti. I like cacti so I liked it.
Nearby there's a modern art piece called The Hive (created by artist Wolfgang Buttress, Simmonds Studio, Stage One and BDP) which intends to highlight the importance of pollination in our food chain. Illuminated by almost one thousand flickering LED lights (and using "swelling" orchestral music) it would probably have looked even better after dark but still looked pretty cool on a crisp spring day as I started to think about ice creams.
If you're a fan of lockdown keep-fit hero Joe Wicks then come to Kew in July when he's doing his thing. If not, there's something to enjoy at Kew any day. I took a long walk along a gently winding path before turning off to look at the Minka House, a one hundred year old Japanese farm house that once stood in the city of Okazaki and belonged to the Yonezu family who made it their home after their original house was bombed by US forces during World War II.
It's pretty neat. I headed from there, past dozens of excitable young Bluey fans, to the Woodland Walk in the far corner of the Gardens. You can actually see the course of the Thames, and the Thames Path (a stretch we walked back in May 2022), and even across to Syon House. At a stretch you can see the tower blocks of Brentford. I like this. It reminds me that Kew Gardens is part of London and, in that, it reminds me of how special a place it is.
I was disappointed that the human size Badger Sett was closed for repair (I've never seen a live badger but I've seen a few dead ones including one in the hills near Llangollen a couple of weeks back) but the Woodland Walk (nearly) made up for it. You have to walk on a wooden walkway so as not to disturb nature doing its thing. I didn't see much fauna (a couple of squirrels) but there was lots of flora to marvel at.
Before the art, I thought I'd do one more conservatory. The Temperate House didn't disappoint. How could it? It contained a woolly jelly palm (which sounds like fun) as well as cabbage trees, and a marble copy of Michelangelo's David.
The Collishaw show was in the modern looking Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. Spread over five rooms, an explanatory board at the beginning told me and other curious visitors how Collishaw is inspired by Victorian methods of optical illusion and how he likes to combine these with digital technology and AI. It all felt quite serious and sombre.
At least it did until I heard kids playing. The title, Petrichor, is used to describe "the smell of rain falling on parched soil" and is intended to resonate with the ongoing, and worsening, climate crisis. It's a compound of the word petro meaning rock and ichor meaning the fluid flowing in the veins of the mythological Greek gods. Right on.
The first two works, Columbine and Whispering Weeds, were based on botanical drawings by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) but, unlike Durer's works, these move. Not dramatically. But gently. The plants blow gracefully in the wind. At first you hardly notice. Soon it becomes enchanting.
Columbine (2018)
Whispering Woods (2011)
Next up is a strangely transfixing nine minute film, Even to the End, which meditates on humanity and the ingenuity of life as well as, on the other hand, our propensity towards plunder and ruin. We have a beautiful planet which most of us manage to appreciate and destroy at the same time. The film is engaging if not instructive and it's set to music too, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. A work that was, itself, inspired by Virgil's Georgics. A classical Roman poem about agriculture.
I didn't know that beforehand. I'm not that well educated. I read that at the exhibition. The camera moved from dense, twilit, forest to abstracted images of specimen plants in glass jars to a wide open sea and then to what appeared to be a rocky, unexplored, island. Imagine what natural delights and horrors await there.
Even to the End (2023)
Even to the End (2023)
Even to the End (2023)
The Venal Muse (2012)
The Venal Muse is a sculpture inspired by the corruption, decadence, and eroticism of French literature. Writers like Charles Baudelaire (1857's Les Fleurs du Mal) and Joris-Karl Huymans (1884's A Retours) were cited and if I wasn't quite able to make the link between these tomes and Collishaw's sculpture I could see in it, as suggested/promised, signs of decay and disfigurement. As well as something strangely, even disturbingly, appealing.
Alluvion is a group of works, with rather grand titles (read on), that look to interrogate the mysterious quality of genetic eveolution. Look closely at these paintings of plants and you will see insects and, I found it harder to find these, "optical contrivances". Collishaw looks to reverse the traditional idea of insects pollinating flowers.
These Feverish Eyes (2023)
Fundamental Interpolations (2023)
That Incomprehensible Clarification (2023)
Heterosis (2023)
Heterosis (2023)
Heterosis is another slow moving video work. It's inspired by the phenomenon of 'tulip mania' during the Dutch Golden Age when tulips become so sought after that they caused the first ever speculative bubble. There's some stuff about non-fungible tokens (something I still don't really understand on many levels) and also about Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel (I have trouble understanding Borges too but think getting to grips with Borges would be far more life enhancing than learning about NFTs) but I just enjoyed watching the plants blossom and bloom before starting all over again.
Greenhouse (date unspecified) borrows from the Vanitas tradition of painting in which artworks reflect on the fleetness of life and how meaningless it is to accumulate wealth or worldly goods. I think what Collishaw has done is film the National Gallery and then add filters to the film to make it look old and decrepit. As if nobody is bothered anymore. I couldn't help thinking of Shelley's Ozymandias:- "look at my works, ye mighty and despair".
Albion is a big monochrome image of a tree and it looks cool. There's some words about oaks and Sherwood Forest but, take it from me, it is best appreciated as a big picture of a cool looking tree.
Greenhouse
Albion (2017)
Albion (2017)
Not as cool as the coolest thing there though. Even cucumbers would be jealous of 2016's The Centrifugal Soul. Models of bowerbirds and birds of paradise that when the lights go off start moving, preening, and feeding each other. Of course it's an optical illusion (one explained by a very friendly staff member) but it's a very impressive one and one that rewards repeated viewings. As does all of Collishaw's work - as does Kew Gardens. A place you can visit at different times of year and have completely different experiences.
I notched up a few more steps, narrowly avoided having my bootlaces eaten by a hungry, and none too shy, Canada goose, and retired to Kew's Pizza Express where I had a delicious margherita pizza with jalapenos (standard for me) washed down with a can of orange Fanta before following that with a stracciatella and vanilla ice cream and getting the tube back to Victoria and the train back to Forest Hill.
I had spent a day with nature and I had a spent a day with art and while art may often try to ape nature, nature always does its own thing regardless. I love them both - and I love pizza and ice cream too - so, on balance, I can say I had a very enjoyable April day out. Thanks to Matt Collishaw for the art and for inspiring me to head over to Kew. Probably ought not to leave it so long next time.
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