“Herbarium” graphic series, 2012-2017, acrilyc on paper, 30x40 cm.
2012, H.L.A.M. Gallery, Voronezh, Russia.
2016, Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
In 1998, in the Grafsky nature reserve, I collected a herbarium of the most common plants of a floodplain meadow and a pine forest.
Herbarium is a unique form of knowledge. It combines a direct, almost childish experience of knowing the world and a vast analytical apparatus created by generations of diligent botanists.
I redrawn leaf-to-leaf my herbarium from the reserve, made imaginary friends among the plants, specified their genera and species. But what does this mean? This knowledge about plants (wider: the world) is not self-deception? Linnaeus believed not. But should I follow his old-fashioned path?
Looking behind my tamed herbs, I tried to understand the realm I had taken them from and its relationship with humanity.
The result of my questions to plants was a sense of nature as a tacit ocean.
The world turns out to be twice a stranger. The first time - simply because of its indifference to the human. The second time - because of modern science's marginalization of living knowledge.
Herbarium, drawing — these outdated ways of understanding allowed me to reattach to the green part of the alienated world.
I continued to gather and draw plants.
