Photo By Gail

When Marc Quinn studied art history in the 1980s, he became enamored with Dutch flower painting of the 16th and 17th centuries. These painters were obliged to wait for each flower to come into season before painting it into their compositions, culminating, and images of ideal but impossible bouquets.

Today, humanity’s impulse to commodify and consume has resulted in a complex supply chain that enables thousands of flowers that don’t belong together seasonally or geographically to be bought at the same time.

Walking through Covent Garden flower market in 2005, Quinn observed these different species, imagining the cargo ships, airplanes, and laboratories – the vast map of modern commerce – that had produced such an aberration of nature’s seasonal and geographic patterns. His flower paintings, such as The White Mangrove of Isabella Island (2009) explore that uncanny proximity and access. This, for Quinn, is amplified in the context of Kew Garden’s collection of flower paintings by Victorian artist Marianne North, on display in her up upon miss Gallery in the garden. North had to travel thousands of miles to document the botanical subject shown in their natural habitat.

Photographed at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London as Part of the Exhibit, Marc Quinn: Light Into Life.