Renata Buziak: Medicinal Plant Cycles
You could be forgiven for thinking that the images on display in Renata Buziak’s exhibition Medicinal Plant Cycles, an exploration of decay and regeneration, were actually facsimiles of paintings. One of the most striking things about them is their vivid colours, iridescent blues and purples vying with incandescent shades of orange. Their incredible amorphousness makes them appear fairly abstract, but, with nature and natural processes as their subject matter, they are simultaneously pictorial, especially where traces of decayed plant matter are evident to ground the work. They could be the output of an earthy Jackson Pollock. Although, with their level of detail, their textural range and freedom of form, one cannot imagine their conception by any human hand. As it is, in these works nature is the one holding the paintbrush… albeit with a little direction.
Buziak has been creating what she terms ‘biochromes’ for over a decade now, in an exploration of the overlap between art and science. The production of these images involves the placing of organic material on photographic emulsions which, when exposed to the elements and left over a length of time (about five to eight weeks), create a dazzling landscape of shapes and colours, a result of the reaction between the photographic chemicals and the process of decomposition (the bacterial micro-organic activity) in the plant matter. Exploring the outcomes of this rather unpredictable process, Buziak experiments with some of the conditions under which they are produced, altering plant type, temperature, level of humidity and light, to achieve various results in her work.
The spirit of nature is omnipresent as you enter the first room of works in Gallery 4. The caws and various calls