©Emily Hamilton Laux, Japanese Knotweed Room, 2017

This week artist Emily Hamilton Laux celebrates artists working with botanicals, but we begin today with Laux’s work and feature two projects and an artist’s book. Laux states:

The vast practice of botanical photography is more than 175 years old, dating back to photographic pioneer Anna Atkins, the mid-19^th century British botanist and artist who utilized the cyanotype process to document and classify algae.

Decades later, German artist Karl Blossfeldt elevated photographs of botanical specimens to an elegant art form, celebrating the form of plants with his close-up, detailed black and white images that bordered on geometric abstraction. Since then, photographers have continued to document, interpret and celebrate the earth’s flora.

Imogen Cunningham depicted the petals magnolia blossoms at close range (during the same years, Georgia O’Keeffe was painting flower blossoms in a similar style); Irving Penn created magnificent supersaturated color images of individual flowers, and Robert Mapplethorpe celebrated the diversity of flora in black and white.

Among today’s best-known artists who use photography to create images of flora are Sharon Core, Cig Harvey, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Abelardo Morell, and Isabelle Menin, among others.

As guest editor for Lenscratch’s first Botanical Week, I wanted to present artists whose approaches move beyond photographing flowers for their beauty. I was interested in those whose creative process has some aspect of innovation, whether by combining photography with other processes, expanding and re-imagining an existing process, or having an exceptional concept. These artists have something original to say; their work shows how flora can be used as a starting point for experimentation, inquiry and unique expression. Each of these artists is new to Lenscratch.

©Emily Hamilton Laux Porcelain Berry Room, 2018

Home Invasions is a speculative narrative about botanical biodiversity. In Home Invasions, I imagine a world in which humans have succumbed completely to “plant blindness,” a British botanical term that refers to the human tendency to ignore plants. At the heart of my creative process is the staging of temporary installations of invasive plants in rooms where the human residents coexist with plant life, either unaware or only vaguely conscious of the intrusion of vines, branches, berries and leaves

Botanical biodiversity loss threatens food and medicinal security, accelerates disease, and speeds up the extinction of most animal species. By including domestic interiors in the category of “ecosystems,” I hope to make the needle jump the groove: to startle or simply nudge viewers into thinking about their own awareness of the enormous changes now occurring in the earth’s biodiversity.

©Emily Hamilton Laux Porcelain Berry Study, 2018

I am a visual artist who works in digital and historic photographic processes, as well as mixed-media and collage. The conceptual foundation of my creative practice is an ongoing exploration of the complex relationships between humans and their environments—natural, domestic, and constructed.

My work follows two parallel paths, one is a long-term project about botanical biodiversity, the other is personal narrative work about family, identity and memory.

My botanical-focused work is a sustained research-based investigation into biodiversity, which includes several distinct but interconnected bodies of work. With this work, I am sounding the alarm about the world’s accelerating biodiversity loss. These projects employ a mix of scientific and studio art-based methods to examine and reframe human interaction with flora.

In my creative practice, I inhabit multiple roles: researcher, scientist, set-designer, anthropologist, and writer, allowing me to blur the boundaries fact and fiction, art and science. I am most excited about new ideas and connections concerning how people experience their environments, and what that means for their own psyches, and their relationships with their families, friends and larger communities, and of course, the natural world.

I present my work in the form of limited-edition prints and small editions of hand-made books.

©Emily Hamilton Laux Air Potato Vine Shower, 2019

My journey into botanical photography was accidental.

In 2014 while working on project inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay Walking, I kept noticing a multitude of invasive vines in the fields and woods where I was photographing.

I picked up some field guides and started talking to gardening friends. The heated invasive-versus-native plant debate interested me, and I wondered how I could depict what seemed to happening: a drastic loss in biodiversity in the botanical world.

Then, that same year, another accident: I found myself stranded without a car for several days at a small house in Maine. I had my camera, a sunny field out back full of wildflowers, and half a dozen large vintage sauerkraut jars found in the attic. I spent one morning creating magnificent floral arrangements of invasive and native flowers. The arrangements were lovely – Martha Stewart would have approved -but nothing more.

Then I had an epiphany: why not put the plants inside the jars filled with water?

And place those jars in front of the glorious light streaming in from the kitchen window? Voila: the Beauty Versus Beauty was born.

©Emily Hamilton Laux Brazilian Pepper Tree Room, 2019

Although they are presented systematically, in the manner of scientific specimens, the jars are not all photographed in the same way. Some have stark white backgrounds, while others are photographed with a hazy background. The earliest images from that summer in Maine are clearly sitting on top of a vintage kitchen sink.

As I made these images, I learned an enormous amount about invasive plants. Eventually I wanted to say more about biodiversity, which led to Home Invasions.

I love every aspect of creating these installations, from imagining and designing the interior scene to sourcing and foraging the plants to installing the plants in a naturalistic way. Each step of the process presents a different kind of challenge, whether it’s avoiding dreaded deer ticks, creating invisible scaffolds for the plants or simply getting the light right. I do all the work myself, and the models are either family members or good friends.

While I was working on Home Invasions, I also made two limited editions of small handmade book called Field Notes, which depicted images from Beauty Versus Beauty and landscape photographs where I had foraged the plants.

I do have a new botanical project under wraps – it involves vintage botanical guides from the early 20^th century, so stay tuned.

© Emily Hamilton Laux Bittersweet Room, 2020

© Emily Hamilton Laux English Ivy Tea, 2023

Field Notes

My small handmade book titled Field Notes is now in its second edition. It depicts select images from Beauty Versus Beauty paired with images of the landscapes where the plants were foraged.

© Emily Hamilton Laux, Field Notes (Cover and Spread)

Beauty Versus Beauty is my personal investigation of the plants that grow in our backyards, along the edges of fields and parking lots, as well flora that are cultivated for their beauty. By portraying selected plant species in isolated in jars of water or with one or two other species, I ask the viewer to reflect on their own concepts of floral beauty and function in the landscape, and to explore ideas about biodiversity.

There is an abundance of information available about ecological systems and biomes, information that is not presented here, because the conversation is enormous, exciting, and changing rapidly. I hope that Beauty Versus Beauty is an entry-point to today’s conversation about biodiversity.

©Emily Hamilton Laux Sensitive Fern + Echinacea, 2015

©Emily Hamilton Laux Ferns + Japanese Knotweed, 2015

©Emily Hamilton Laux Rosehips + Common Burdock, 2016

©Emily Hamilton Laux Stargazer Lily, 2016

©Emily Hamilton Laux Cyperus involucratus + Bougainvillea, 2017

©Emily Hamilton Laux Stargazer Lily, 2016

© Emily Hamilton Laux Cyperus involucratus + Bougainvillea, 2017

Emily Hamilton Laux is a visual artist who uses photography to examine ideas about the human relationship with internal and external environments. She is working on a long-term, multi-faceted project on biodiversity. Her other more personal work concerns ideas about identity, family, and memory.

Laux has exhibited her work at the Westport Library, the New Britain Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Beechwood Arts Salon, and Terrain (Westport). Her work has been shown at numerous galleries in the Northeast, including PhotoPlace Gallery, the Rhode Island Center for the Photographic Arts, the Davis Orton Gallery, the Westport Arts Center, and the Ridgefield Artists Guild, among others.

 Laux maintains a studio at Firing Circuits Studios in Norwalk, and is member of the Westport Artists Collective. She lives in Westport, CT.

Born in Saigon, and raised in Cambodia, Paris and Washington, Laux has an MA from the American University School of International Service and a BA from Tulane University. Previously, Laux worked in publishing in New York, London and Hong Kong. In Connecticut, she worked as a photojournalist, gallery manager and arts publicist.

Instagram: @emilyhlaux