Flora: A Frozen English Garden
Flora: A Frozen English Garden presents artist Marisa Culatto’s Flora series from a botanical perspective, with texts by botanical researcher and landscape gardener Eduardo Barba, and botanical watercolour illustrations by Anna Tiulkina.
Culatto’s Flora includes 35 works, each featuring a selection of plant life that has been composed, frozen and then photographed in the manner of a classic still life. There is a conscious act of staging but also an element of chance encounter to these works as the artist restricted herself to collecting the vegetation she came across on walks or in the day-to-day tasks of her daily life. As a consequence, each still life features plants that were found near one another and in a specific part of the world, such as the South East of England.
The conceptual intention addresses beauty, the loss of it, and the vain attempt to hold on to it. Through these works, Culatto tries to understand and accept the value of fading youth; Flora is her personal way of exploring and coming to terms with it. Ultimately, this body of work also speaks of the very act of photography: to freeze the moment.
Flora: A Frozen English Garden is presented in 35 chapters – one for each work in the Flora series. In addition to the artwork itself, each section includes botanical content: Barba writes about a single plant from the relevant work and, as the plants in Flora are encased in ice and are not always clearly visible, Tiulkina’s illustration provides an accurate depiction of the chosen plant.
The book also includes a thorough introductory text by the internationally renowned contemporary art curator Greg Hilty, whose interest in the intersection of disciplines has spanned his tenures at the Hayward Gallery, Arts Council England and Lisson Gallery, where he has been the Curatorial Director since 2008.
Marisa Culatto
Marisa Culatto was born in the Canary Islands and lives and works in the UK. She has spent the past decade working almost exclusively with digital photography preoccupied with pushing – and blurring – the boundaries of photography into the languages and practices usually associated with other mediums.
Constraints, domesticity and daily rituals are at the centre of her practice. Culatto is also interested in the notion of reality being a construct, and, therefore, much of her work addresses contradictions, misperceptions and a degree of visual ambiguity. In addition, due to her ambivalent relationship with the photographic medium, she is interested in exploring photography itself as her subject.
Lockdown had a big impact on Culatto’s practice, with her reincorporating paint, ink, markers and watercolour on paper, and recently combining all of these with photography.
Culatto’s work has been exhibited extensively on the international stage, both in solo and group exhibitions. In 2011, she won the AlNorte Grant at the X National Contemporary Arts Week of Asturias, Spain. She was a finalist in the 2015–16 Contemporary Talents competition for the Fondation François Schneider, France; won the Juror’s Special Commendation at the XXI International Photography Prize Rafael Ramos García, Tenerife, Spain; and in 2017 was a finalist at the VIA Arts Prize, London. Her work features in numerous private collections around the world, including a piece that was acquired by the prestigious Soho House Collection for permanent display. Her body of work Flora was published by The Observer newspaper in August 2020, both online and in print.
Eduardo Barba
Eduardo Barba was born in Madrid and lives and works in Spain. He is a professional gardener, landscape designer, gardening tutor and botanical researcher of plants in works of art. He is as passionate about the plant kingdom as he is about the visual arts, which has led him to identify and catalogue all the plants that appear in thousands of paintings in the collection of the Prado Museum and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. He has undertaken similar research projects for the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and other museums internationally, as well as for art historians, curators, conservators and private collectors.
Barba has given talks internationally and written for art catalogues for several museums including the Prado Museum. His collaboration with the Prado also resulted in the publication of his book The Garden at El Prado(Espasa, 2020) – a botanical walk around works by the great masters, now in its 8th edition. More recently, he published a book about urban flora called A Flower in the Asphalt(Tres Hermanas, 2021), now in its 4th edition. His third book, Paradise in Brushstrokes: Gardens in Works of Art, will be published by Espasa in March 2023.
Barba has designed gardens in Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, the US and Australia. He writes a weekly gardening column in Spanish national newspaper El Paísand has a regular gardening slot on Spanish national radio station Cadena SER.
Anna Tiulkina
From Anna Farba Illustration, Anna Tiulkina was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
Tiulkina is a botanical illustrator, flower painter and food artist. With a degree in design and a background in fine art, she uses watercolours to create visual narratives of flora, placing a special focus on paintings that explore our connection to plants in the modern age. Her illustrations have appeared in books and been used in the commercial packaging of food, medical and cosmetic products. In 2020, she illustrated a book called Wild Remedies, which was warmly received.
