Greenhouse Culture, an installation by Anna Thorell at the Brighton Festival Open House during May 2006 - part of an exhibition inspired by Darwin's work and ideas about evolution.
"Pretending to be arriving at the greeenhouse on the 'Beagle' as a scientist, 'on the face of it' I saw arrays of ceramic forms in a greenhouse. They swayed in the breeze but did not move otherwise. I concluded that they were probably plants and not animals. They reminded me of the heads of composite flower heads like sunflowers. Each of the four arrays showed a spatial difference from simple to complex or from complex to simple, depending upon which side of the installation you stood. Was that the emergence of complexity or the shedding of the ornate detail? It was possible to deduce the 'rule' governing the transformation within each set.
The face of the flowers also contained more fine lines, which (following Anna's captions) I could take perhaps to be the revealed lines of 'construction' of the flower head (for example, like the seams one sees on the midline of insects that are built from two distinct bodies of cells (left and right). Alternatively, I could take the lines and geometry to be impressed upon the flower (nature) by humans (arrogant rationalism) busy analysing the construction of the flowers. Some might say that analysis 'reduces' the object, though that is a view I do not share.
The arrays of 'flower faces' might be a record of change over space (the extent of the natural habitat or environment colonised by this plant) or a record of genetic change over generations of flowers.
Anna's several captions mentioned the individual differences between the units, reflecting chance fluctuations in the manufacturing or copying process (the genetic process?) that were expressed as imperfections. My view would be that very few individual objects can be reproduced exactly (think of photocopies, or vinyl records, or Chinese whispers). Plant a field with identical seeds and see what happens. A notable exception is that DNA is copied in extremely high fidelity, though the resulting organism produced will always show chance variations. The intimation that the fine surface patterns are revealing their genetics resonated with the idea of genetic modification (of nature), and prompted us to think on that issue."
Robert Whittle (1942 - 2010)