Plant Dreaming at Leeds Art Gallery

Leeds Art Gallery presents Plant Dreaming, a group exhibition with plant knowledge at its heart.

While the exhibition focuses on plants, its perspective is far from scientific, instead paying close attention to the poetry and narrative of plant lives, creative interpretations, folklore, ritual and ecopolitics. 

In practical terms, you’ll find anything from large-scale textiles, to drawings, ceramics and film. Highlights include Emma Talbot’s large-scale paintings on silk in warm colours, which take as their subject the medicinal uses of plants. Her style is instantly recognisable by the palette and the short texts she includes in her paintings, noting questions and statements that reveal the fears and uncertainties we all share.

Aliyah Hussain’s installation incorporates ceramics and focuses on the artist’s experience of living with flooding making comparisons between the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, with the floodplains created by the construction of the Mangla Dam in Pakistan.

Photographer Yan Wang Preston explores the politics of landscape and uses the Rhododendron ponticum as both the subject of her images, and the focus of reflections on nationality, belonging and the hierarchy between the native and the non-native. The artist photographed a particular love-heart-shaped Rhododendron bush every other day for a year, resulting in an extensive research project and archive of images.

Noémie Goudal’s films play with our perception, creating skilful illusions in their multi-layered natural imagery. Her piece in the exhibition considers deep geological time, death and renewal.

The show also features the work of Jane Lawson, SHARP and Charmaine Watkiss, making for a satisfying group display of varied perspectives.

Plant Dreaming is, of course, accompanied by a programme of talks and workshops. There will also be a showcase of botanical specimens from Leeds Museums and Galleries’ extensive Natural Science Collection.