‘The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree’


Before I start this review, I believe it’s important to state that this was my first online exhibition experience. Strangely, I just recently realised that I had never completely interacted with one before. I have eventually scrolled through a few, but they never captured me long enough to fully absorb them. I guess while living in London and having so many physical gallery spaces to visit, I never felt the necessity to look for online platforms. However, during a global health crisis, with galleries having to close its doors and myself having to isolate at home, I had no choice but to turn to online platforms if I had any interest in keep seeing art.

That was how I found ‘The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree’ which immediately got my attention with its mystical title. It evoked a spiritual sense that related to my thoughts during lockdown, as many of us were starting to turn into more cautious and introspective lifestyles. The idea of a ‘botanical mind’ related to the context of seeing myself and others turning to nature to find comfort during a distressful situation. While life as we knew was being paused, it was still spring, flowers kept blooming and days kept growing. The show was originally scheduled to open on Earth Day, 22 April 2020, as a physical group exhibition. But due to the Covid-19 crisis, it had to be postponed. Quickly, Camden Arts Centre and the curators Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark transformed the show into an online programme, offering informative content with new artist commissions, podcasts, texts, images and audio. The resulted programme is a trans-generational mix of artworks and historic documents from many continents and with works spanning more than five hundred years. It is organised in six different chapters, investigating the significance of the plant kingdom to human life on many different planes, cultures and times.


The first thing I see on the website is a seventeen minute video introducing the individual chapters to be explored: ‘The Cosmic Tree’, ‘Sacred Geometry’, ‘Indigenous Cosmologies’, ‘Astrological Botany’, ‘As within, So Without’ and ‘Vegetal Ontology’. The video is edited with a mix of archive imagery and new commissioned artworks, on top of a mysterious soundtrack by Kirk Barley. It immediately sets the tone for the entire show with a very scientific and informative language, almost resembling an exhibition from the Natural History Museum.

After watching the video, I question myself if I would have watched the whole seventeen minutes of it if I was in a gallery space. I also wondered how they would have installed it and what kind of seats they would have. It was difficult to take the gallery space out of my mind at first, but due to the show’s particular diversity of content, I soon started to immerse myself in. Each chapter has different artists and mediums. Some are accompanied by podcasts, as Rupert Sheldrake’s ‘Why is there so much beauty in the world?’ in Sacred Geometry. The biologist and plant physiologist argues that beauty is not a subjective coincidence, but a unifying principle related to the harmonic organisation of the universe.

Other chapters are accompanied by moving image, as Adam Chodzko’s specially commissioned digital work ‘O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix’. The video shown is an excerpt of the original artwork which is played infinitely and in real time. It was created in collaboration with computer coders Black Shuck, with who the artist developed an algorithm that ‘scans footage of undergrowth, woodland and forest, looking for the ciphers in the shadows between and under the vegetation.’. Chodzko describes his works as ‘propositions for aberrant forms of ‘social media’’, which in this case are represented by a search for the secret language found in plants, the ‘Lingua Ignotae’ - created by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. In the artist’s proposition, I find it interesting how a medieval concept becomes the main inspiration for a future form of social media, where words are not said directly, but scanned through shapes and energies. In fact, Von Bingen has a very prominent presence in many of the contemporary works in the programme. Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess, who was also an ecologist thinker. Her cosmology is a major inspiration for the show and it is based on the combination of science, mysticism and art.

Andrea Büttner is another artist showcased in the Cosmic Tree chapter, whose work evokes religious themes associated with Catholic monastic traditions. The works shown form a small retrospective of her practice, focusing on her study about moss, potatoes and her most recent work on overgrown planting beds on former Nazi concentrations camps. The artist’s ceiling paintings of potatoes especially got my attention for dealing with such a mundane subject, that is also a symbol of survival and proletarian work. The images are accompanied by an essay by Malin Ståhl reflecting on the artist’s practice. Ståhl describes how Büttner found interest in the theme, after discovering that local farmers from Bavaria used to make reverse glass paintings as offerings to the church, hoping they would be blessed with good harvests. When the harvests were still unsuccessful, the paintings would become an exchange currency to fight poverty. The potatoes represented in the artist’s ceiling paintings are simple forms made with confident strokes of light and shadow. The background is cyan blue, which makes the vegetables look like asteroids in space, but asteroids with sources of life, as we can see by their subtle sprouts.

A big emphasis of ‘The Botanical Mind’ lies on the theme of Indigenous Cosmologies - taking inspiration on how these families live in harmony with the natural cycles of nature. The chapter focuses mainly on the Yawanawá people, an indigenous tribe from the Amazon rainforest, with who artist Delfina Muñoz de Toro has been collaborating in a new artwork for the show. The work is inspired by ‘kené’ - sacred geometries found in nature, which they depict onto their skin and ceramics.  Some believe that ‘these geometries once connected the universe in a continuous tissue - a primordial reality in which the planes of existence (material, immaterial, visible, invisible) were once unified and whole.’.

In the current climate change debate and the emphasis on the Amazon rainforest preservation, the idea of a unified universe is undoubtedly essential. Considering every action and every life form, is a way of learning from each other and making way for a more hopeful future. In the About section of the website, the exhibition theme is compared to the lockdown context: ‘During this period of enforced stillness, our behaviour might be seen to resonate with plants: like them we are now fixed in one place, subject to new rhythms of time, contemplation, personal growth and transformation.’. As plants are in constant response to their environment, so are we now starting to pay more attention to our surroundings and our positions in them.

The other day I was talking to a friend who is an avid online show consumer. He was arguing how online shows had to be interactive and fast paced to grab the viewer’s attention. ‘The Botanical Mind’ is the complete opposite of those ideas: its design is very classic and straight forward, it is organised as a dense archive, with chapters filled with many time consuming works: essays, podcasts and videos. Although this format can sometimes be overwhelming, it, somehow, fits perfectly to the period of lockdown - when many of us started to look for new skills or to refine some of the ones we already had. It makes me think that, perhaps, flashy and catchy images are not what we are looking for right now. The context of a global crisis and being isolation made me feel more conscious of how I spend my time and more selective about the content I want to explore.

Being a multi-continental and trans-generational group show, it also emphasis on learning from our ancestors and past experiences, as well as from different cultures and civilisations. The idea of generational knowledge - something so strong in my parents and grandparents generation - was an activity that I feel went behind the curtains with the appearance of the internet. Now, after so many people have gone back to their family homes or went to isolate next to the ones they feel safer, it was also be a good opportunity to explore these relationships in more profound ways by sharing knowledge, memories and emotions. It is not necessarily a surprise when I see people around me making sourdough, fermenting food or starting to plant. All these activities are century-old human activities, which require time and patience. In times of uncertainty, nature and generational knowledge is what gives us peace.

‘The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree’ is a celebration of the knowledge we have gathered through the centuries by simply observing and interpreting our environment. It shows us past periods, highlights the present one we are living in and also shows us a way into a more considerate and enlightening future.




The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree is on until the 31 July at botanicalmind.online