Fake Plants

At the onset of the pandemic, I began making fake plants in my Berlin apartment. It was a way of staying busy at a very anxious time. The first one became a four-foot tall cactus, made from cardboard boxes I pulled out of the recycling bin and about 600 toothpicks that I hand-painted and stuck into the cactus body. I based it a bit on the shape of a Mexican Fence Post Cactus (Marginatocereus marginatus). After completing it, I had understood something about its architecture in a very direct and satisfying way.

I kept making more. Scavenging for materials revealed treasures in the kitchen trash, my building's recycling area, and a construction site I passed on my walk to my studio. I made use of polystyrene balls picked apart from a larger brick of packaging, scrubbing pads and sponges, paper packaging from food products, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, toothpicks, leftover craft supplies, and disposable medical masks, which were so ubiquitous at the time.

In both the sculpture and the photography of the sculpture I was after a highly refined form. I based my approach to the photography after seeing images on the websites of bonsai clubs in Japan and noticing how they often documented their plants against a deep black ground. Whether encountering the sculptures themselves or the photographs of them, I wanted a viewer to have two experiences at the same time: they could recognize the unspectacular materials before them, but at the same time, they could see something extremely transformed.

I always worked with recollection and invention rather than trying to make accurate representations of existing plant species. Although these works take the form of peculiar flora and fauna perhaps belonging to unexplored or imagined landscapes, many people have commented that they resemble sea creatures or underwater corals as well as plants that grow in the ground. Some of my fake plants grow in salt, suggesting a parched ecosystem that some plants have somehow adapted to. Ultimately, I hope that an encounter with any of my Fake Plants brings viewers closer to the overlooked, familiar matter that constitutes their domestic lives.