Plants have been a mainstay of architectural, domestic and personal adornment over many centuries and Rob Kessler uses the tools of contemporary science to bring the decorative tradition closer to the canon of botanical illustration. The works in the British Council collection are part of a series (featured in the book Seeds: Time Capsules of Life), where magnified images of seeds are shown alongside an image of their parent plant. This shift in focus gives a sense of the range of complex information at hand, while the seed, represented as a single visual statement, has a simplicity that takes on almost a symbolic value.

Kessler explores the gap between the functionality of plants’ colouring, and the decorative uses to which it has been put. Bees are able to detect colours and markings on flowers, invisible to the human eye, that guide them to the nectar, picking up and transferring pollen on their way. These colours and patterns are exposed under ultraviolet light. At the beginning of the process, Kessler captures black and white images of a specimen on a scanning electron microscope [SEM], which can magnify pollen grains by up to 50,000 times. The specimen’s original colour is already diminished, as it is coated in a fine layer of platinum to reflect the electron particles in the chamber. The resultant images are reassembled in Photoshop, where distractions in the background are eliminated and the form tidied, prior to colour conversion. Working with a pen and graphic tablet, Kessler accrues and erases successive layers of colour, either referring back to the plant or following his intuition. Digital manipulation distances Bog Asphodel and Field Penny-Cress from scientific studies; these are Kesseler’s personal portraits, where the plants’ genetic idiosyncrasy is written into every fissure, wrinkle and pore.

The plants’ names clothe scientific findings with more romantic associations of place and history. Bog Asphodel thrives in peaty bogs. This specimen was collected on the island of Iona on a windy hillside in late summer. Its Latin name Narthecium ossifragum translates as ‘bone-breaker’ and legend has it that if sheep eat the plant it is likely to weaken their bones (by coincidence, the artist recalls that a sheep’s skull was found near to the spot where photograph was taken). The isolated close-up encourages comparisons to abound. The spindly seeds posses a spooky, bone-like quality, reaching out like metacarpals.

Field penny-cress, Thlaspi arvense, is a member of the cabbage family and the dry seed pod was photographed at Kew. Rows of pods line up along the stem and the seeds can be seen through the thin wall of the seed pod. The seed not only echoes the form of the pod, but is suggestive of an entire landscape. Looming on its own against the black, it could something from outer space. The decontextualisation of seed from parent plant in the twin images,

Bog Asphodel and Field Penny-Cress, is synchronous with Kesseler’s larger project, to uproot botanical imagery and plant it in the aesthetic sphere.

Bibliography
Rob Kesseler: Up Close (Papadakis, London 2010)
Hardy, Madeline, Rob Kessler and Wolfgang Stuppy, The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants (Firefly Books, Canada 2009)
Kessler, Rob and Wolfgang Stuppy, Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible (Firefly Books, Canada 2008)
Kessler, Rob and Wolfgang Stuppy, Seeds: Time Capsules of Life (Papadakis, London 2006)
Kessler, Rob and Madeline Hardy, Pollen: the Hidden Sexuality of Flowers (Papadakis, London 2004)
Kessler, Rob, Botanizing the Library (Proboscis, London 2004)