Last chance to see Light into Life by Marc Quinn at Kew Gardens

Light into Life, an exhibition by contemporary artist Marc Quinn, will close at London’s Kew Gardens on Sunday 29 September 2024. Exploring the relationship between people and plants, this unique collaboration between Quinn and Kew’s teams of scientists and horticulturists includes monumental sculptures across the Gardens. Building on the artist’s long-standing interest in nature and the human experience, Quinn’s Light into Life encompasses monumental sculptures across the Gardens alongside a dedicated presentation of works from the 1990s until today in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. Offering moments of thoughtful reflection and interaction throughout the Gardens, the exhibition examines our complex relationship with the natural world and represents one of the largest site-specific art projects at Kew to date. 

Working with specialists from a variety of fields including taxonomy and plant diversity, Quinn has created pieces based on significant plants from the collections at Kew. Amongst these is a series of large-scale sculptures based on herbarium specimens of plants which have inspired drug discovery, including the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), a source of drugs used for pain relief. These abstract sculptures not only tell the vital story of our reliance on the natural world for therapeutic treatments, but also emphasise the constructive quality of humanity’s complicated relationship with nature. 

This theme is further reflected in Held by Desire; two large bronze bonsai sculptures which take centre stage in the Temperate House, the world’s largest surviving Victorian glasshouse. Known the world over as the art of growing miniature trees and shrubs, bonsai are kept at a consistently small size through careful pruning, perhaps the most painstaking manipulation of nature for aesthetic purposes. Quinn’s 5 metre sculptural versions in bronze free the trees from the bonds of human control and align them with their own nature by enlarging them to their full potential.

Celebrating the magnificence of Kew’s 175-year-old Palm House, Quinn has also created a series of new sculptural portraits of palm leaves based on the Bismarck (Bismarckia nobilis) and Sabal (Sabal palmetto) palms from within the glasshouse, often described as Kew’s living laboratory. These artworks are emblematic manifestations of our relationship with trees and their role in the shelter, food and fabric of daily survival for billions of people across the world. Created in polished stainless steel, the mirroring reminds us of the role of light in the creation of plants and all living things, and blurs the boundaries between viewer, plant and landscape. 

New works on display in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art include Forecourt Herbarium, a reinterpretation of Kew’s seven million-strong collection of preserved plant specimens. Touring the Herbarium, Quinn was astonished by the number of dried plants in the collection seemingly containing every variety but one: supermarket and petrol station flowers. These cultivated creations speak to the human impulse to create flowers which don’t ordinarily exist in nature.

Newly installed in the gallery is Archaeology of Architecture a sculpture of a bouquet of calla lilies cast in solid crystal glass. The lilies are depicted one and a half times life size – the scale reserved for the idealised sculptures of the deified in classical art. The sculpture traces our modern architectural forms to their more natural origins, drawing a link between today’s crystalline high-rises and the humble shelters of early humans made from the branches of trees. Simultaneously heavy and yet evoking lightness, the work holds a cosmic landscape within it, where bubbles of air are frozen in the liquid crystal glass, reminding us of our scale in relation to nature. Alongside this, another new piece, Human Nature takes the same bunch of calla lilies used for The Archaeology of Architecture and casts them in animal blood, a commercial product readily available in dehydrated form as a fertiliser. Fertiliser uses the death of one thing to enable the life of another; that this sale of ‘death’ could be conducted so mundanely struck Quinn as a window into our relationship with nature, one marked by commodification, consumption, and the uncomfortable duality of us celebrating what we simultaneously destroy.

Accompanying these new sculptures is a selection of existing artworks, many of which explore the idea of nature as a fundamental part of humanity, a prominent focus of Marc Quinn’s practice since the 1990s. Also in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, a new exhibition in Gallery Six includes a selection of works from The Shirley Sherwood Collection, featuring botanical paintings co-curated by Dr Sherwood and Quinn, alongside a selection of Quinn’s drawings. These works reflect the plants which have inspired the artworks integral to Light into Life, including orchids, lilies, bonsai and coconut palms.

An accompanying exhibition guide is also available from Kew Publishing. It features contributions from writer, curator and Artistic Director of viennacontemporary Francesca Gavin, Prof. William J. Baker, Senior Research Leader and Dr Melanie-Jayne R. Howes, Senior Research Leader in Biological Chemistry at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is dedicated to harnessing the power of plants and fungi to end the extinction crisis and secure a future for all life on Earth. With Kew’s world-leading research, global partnerships and beloved gardens – home to the world’s most diverse collections of plants and fungi – Kew is using its trusted voice to shape policy and practice worldwide. As a charity Kew relies on the critical support of its visitors, not only to sustain the gardens, but to protect global plant and fungal biodiversity for the benefit of our planet and humanity.

ENDS