Planting the seed
The Australia landscape at the British Museum
Last month, the British Museum opened its Australia landscape for the summer. This is the third year that they have run this collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, following the South African landscape last year, and the Indian one in 2009. These are always timed to coincide with more ‘traditional’ exhibits in the museum, so the Australia Landscape complements the ‘Out of Australia’ prints and drawings and the ‘Baskets and belonging’ show.
These landscapes are always popular, and make a welcome addition to the rather bare front of the British Museum. In fact, every year the area looks sad at the end of the landscape season and I think the British Museum would benefit from permanently re-landscaping this area much like the V&A have done with their John Madejski garden – a favourite spot in the summer.
But, these landscapes always raise interesting questions about what is an object. The British Museum and Kew both hold national collections, and these landscapes are essentially collaborative exhibitions between the two. Most people would rarely think of a plant as an object in the same way as say an aboriginal basket, but this is something that interests me.
The early collectors behind our museums, like Hans Sloane at the British Museum or Henry Wellcome at the Wellcome Collection, collected plants as well as objects, and they were very important sites of knowledge creation and transfer in the eighteenth century. The British Museum and Kew are recreating these sorts of relationships in fascinating ways.
National collections of plants, and the gardens in which they are displayed, are also spectacular spaces for reverse collaborations. I have always remembered the Chihuly exhibition at Kew in 2005-6, and the Henry Moore show in 2007-8. These were not just outside art displays like those becoming popular with stately homes (such as 'Beyond Limits' the annual collaboration between Chatsworth and Christies), but thought-provoking exhibits which make relationships between the plants and the sculptures as objects of beauty. The Chihuly show is one of the most visually stimulating shows I have ever seen. Juxtaposing glass with flesh plant forms invested both with greater power, and showcased the plants as objects of beauty and knowledge.