Vegetable or Mineral?
Intrigued by the simplicity in the golden spiral – a set of proportion rules that denotes beauty found in nature and often adopted by artist and designers - My aim with this work was to be inspired by this proportion, the spiral form and the geometry but to bring chaos and disorder. I found this in a type of broccoli called a Romanesque. I have always been fascinated by the fractal and other worldly form of this type of vegetable and was interested to see if I could incorporate it into one of my artworks.
The geometric forms and blocks that I built around the vegetable served to mirror the fractals but these were manmade, imperfect and distorted. The work can be read in a number of ways depending on which lens of nature we decided to use. It could be looked at with the binary view of human made vs natural - The broccoli appearing to erupt from a chaos of human made forms, implying the Gaia theory that nature will always survive and thrive despite us. Or it could be seen as one structure, formed from a volcanic eruption or coral growth with the otherworldly appearance often seen in organic forms beneath the waves. A relic dug up from the sea bed.
