Unseen Flora

Part of the wider Artificial Botany (2019) series, the Unseen Flora collection shines a spotlight on the fantastical and surreal botanical illustrations created by four British scientists and artists: Charlotte Bancroft, Beatrice Hastings, Edmund Thorne and Theodore Winslow. The collection has as its focus the concept of truth, contextualised in the contemporary digital age where the boundaries between real and virtual, natural and artificial, seem to become more and more obscure. Especially after the sudden influx of innovative technologies led by AI language models and image generation systems, the notion of truth has become even more arbitrary, always hidden behind a thin veil of plausibility and verisimilitude.

Unseen Flora stands at the interplay between these areas: the collection wants to explore unreal but plausible histories through the visual depictions of the four illustrators, offering us an unprecedented glimpse into their imaginary botanical dimensions.