Lusciousness - flora and the crafted image in a digital environment

With it's seemingly endless array of colourful forms and structures, the plant world has inspired generations of artisans, artists, designers and illustrators, resulting in a spectacular wealth of images and objects that have served to inform and captivate it's many audiences. Styles and forms of representation have evolved in parallel to technological advances in science and industry, from drawing to painting, through photography and now digital media, the plant world continues to provide apowerful source for creative exploration. Since being given a microscope at the age of ten Rob Kesseler has always been fascinated by a world too small to see with the naked eye. Over the past ten years has collaborated with botanical scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and more recently with molecular biologists at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal to produce a body of work that exposes and celebrates this exotic and alluring micro world in a unique way. Just as plants employ colour coded messages to attract an audience of insect collaborators; through artistic intervention and interpretation he has sought to create mesmeric images and symbolic objects that carry many messages: markers with which we retain contact with the natural world. Lusciousness weaves together some influential works from the past two thousand years of Art with key works throughout his career.

To coincide with the lecture,a monograph, Rob Kesseler Up Close, covering the past thirty years of the artists work will be published by Papadakis, London.

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