Homegrown


Botanical Portraits by David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk


21 Jan – 12 Apr 2021

Exhibition

The natural world is all around us and ever-present, but rarely are we able to examine its intricacies and wondrous designs up close. Working in collaboration with the National Trust and the National Gallery, collective duo David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk created a series of ten photographs in the summer of 2019 to showcase the native flora of the Cayman Islands. Utilising the transformative power of the camera’s lens, Hartwell and Ferehawk capture the elegance of these beguiling specimens with a visual and compositional economy that is alternately striking and understated in equal measure. Through a laborious process developed over several years, the artists have honed a technique of shooting their subjects on location — in this instance at the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park in Grand Cayman — utilising a portable background and two lightweight LED panels to achieve an astonishing array of optical effects. Drawing out the stark beauty of the thorny shake hand, the alien-like tendrils of the ghost orchid, and the raw bones’ delicately trembling stamens, the photographers have fashioned a series of plant ‘portraits’ that speak to the uniqueness and individuality of each in turn, while also revealing their wider significance within Caymanian culture.

ARTISTS’ STATEMENT

David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk both live in Los Angeles and work as commercial artists in the film industry. As fine artists working together, they are known as Collective Artist Collective. Over the past decade, the artists have created numerous pieces and installations, each collaboration part of an ongoing investigation into the ways places and histories are marked and remembered. Homegrown continues their multi-year conversation about place through a series of large photographic portraits of native and endemic plants of the Cayman Islands. In the artists’ own words:

“Plants are powerful visual markers of a place and a culture. Our interest is in elaborating this connection, drawing upon a long tradition of botanical paintings and photographic images of plants, both from the Cayman Islands and by international photographers, such as Imogen Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Edward Weston. Photography is the choreography of known quantities, whose limitations and predictabilities are finely orchestrated, resulting in a representation that never was. The photograph becomes an imperfect witness to events that never truly happened as depicted, but for one exception: in the photographer’s mind. As such, the photographs in this series are idiosyncratic visual investigations of the specific plants we encountered. The images magnify our gaze of these plants, first through the instrument of the camera and lens, but also through the complex manipulation of their production and post-production process. The portraits of Homegrown are as much a portrayal of the artist’s conversation about plants of the Cayman Islands as they are a record of the subjects taken.”

– David Hartwell and Bill Ferehawk

A project of the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands and the National Trust for the Cayman Islands

National Trust Cayman Islands
National Gallery Cayman Islands

Loop News Cayman

“Gallery launches exhibit on the importance of Caymanian plant life”
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Caymanian Times

“Exhibition showcases Cayman’s natural beauty”
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