PLANT-BASED (2024)
In the modern era, humankind has developed an ambiguous and equivocal relationship with its biotic environment, which is often referred to as nature. However, this designation involves some fundamental semantic pitfalls that have become an integral part of contemporary life. The term nature implies something autogenous, unwilling, untameable and unpredictable, even though such pristine environments, at least in the so-called developed world, have well-neigh disappeared. Rather than wild or natural, even the most idyllic meadows and forests are usually the result of centuries and millennia of human interventions, reflecting the tendencies of concurrent cultures.
Perhaps it is precisely because of our increasingly distanced relationship with the natural environment that the human species is also becoming increasingly obsessed with nature and the Earth’s ecosystem. In the past two hundred years, when civilisation has measured its success only in terms of material gains and scientific progress, nature has become greatly admired and idealised. If, in the past, people lived in awe of the environment, whose elements could be a life-and-death matter, since the industrial age, nature has seemingly been tamed and controlled. At the same time, the increasing density of artificial structures has pushed humans from the harshness of the biotic environment into the safe, isolated dwellings of the urbanised world.
With the development of scientific thought, an awareness of nature and the biotic world began to develop, the Age of Enlightenment having inspired the desire for more thorough and rational knowledge of them. This is when hybrid structures such as the herbarium or the garden emerged, both the result of human activity to scientifically catalogue, shape, control and manage the flora (and fauna) of their perceptual world. The garden and the herbarium are the ultimate manifestations of the human desire to dominate their biotic surroundings, maintaining direct contact with the natural elements while tailoring them to human will and desire. This fine line between the biotic and the artificial is also the starting point for photographer Tilyen Mucik, whose artistic practice focuses on observing and documenting plant life. Her images are rooted in a primary fascination with the living, biotic and misunderstood world of vegetation.
Mucik is perhaps primarily driven by her passion and love for flora, which she cultivates professionally as part of her plant business and in her artistic practice, where plants are her main inspiration and motif. Her works often draw on the need for photographic experimentation, and her images, compositions and series are frequently made according to the principles of the herbarium. In fact, Mucik often documents plants as portraits to highlight their individual characteristics, organic textures, patterns, veins, shapes and structures. At the same time, she is interested in the coexistence of plants in semi-controlled environments, such as a garden or a park.
In her representation of a wide variety of greenery, Mucik relies crucially on photography, which, for her, is an interface for maintaining sufficient distance from her subject – the plant. In her series, Plant-Based, she takes a step further from the archetypical photographic image, using plant leaves as the medium for showing the selected works. She uses the analogue photographic process, focusing on experimental ways of printing images and using organic dyes. Her images are then exposed to various external factors, in particular light, which determine their subsequent life beyond the decisive influence of the artist. In her artistic practice, especially in the present new work, Mucik thus consistently combines fields such as biology, botany and chemistry.
The artist’s recent practice is primarily characterised by the imperfection of the experimental photographic process and the imperfection of organic forms, which are an integral part of the plant world and go against the human tendency and ability to create almost perfect symmetry and geometry. The work Plant-Based is conceived as a photographic herbarium. Mucik’s works inevitably suggest the ambivalent relationship between human culture and autogenous nature, as well as their paradoxical intertwinement, her works mostly depicting house and garden plants, which are often the product of biological genetics. The symmetrical and meticulous design is reminiscent of both a garden and a herbarium, alluding to the nuanced relationship between humans and their environment. On the one hand, humans want to tame natural processes and subjugate them for their own benefit, while on the other hand, they are repeatedly fascinated by nature’s wildness, ruthlessness, resilience and arbitrariness.
Miha Colner