Homegrown
Commissioned by National Gallery of the Cayman Islands and the National Trust of the Cayman Islands. Commissioned in 2019, shown in 2021. Now included in the Museum’s Permanent National Collection and on show 2021-2022 within Terra Botanica, Depictions of Nature from the National Collection.
Homegrown – Portraits of Cayman’s Native Plants is an exhibition that seeks to explore a dimension of Cayman’s identity through ten large photographic portraits of native flora. David and fellow artist Bill Ferehawk spent three weeks in July 2019 documenting these sometimes minuscule marvels of nature.
Utilising the transformative power of the camera’s lens, Hartwell and Ferehawk capture the elegance of these beguiling specimens with a visual and compositional economy that is alternately striking and understated in equal measure. Through a laborious process developed over several years, the artists have honed a technique of shooting their subjects on location — in this instance at the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park in Grand Cayman — utilising a portable studio to achieve an astonishing array of optical effects. Drawing out the stark beauty of the thorny shake hand, the alien-like tendrils of the ghost orchid, and the raw bones’ delicately trembling stamens, the photographers have fashioned a series of plant ‘portraits’ that speak to the uniqueness and individuality of each in turn, while also revealing their wider significance within Caymanian culture.
“Plants are powerful visual markers of a place and a culture. Our interest is in elaborating this connection, drawing upon a long tradition of botanical paintings and photographic images of plants, both from the Cayman Islands and by international photographers, such as Imogen Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Edward Weston. Photography is the choreography of known quantities, whose limitations and predictabilities are finely orchestrated, resulting in a representation that never was. The photograph becomes an imperfect witness to events that never truly happened as depicted, but for one exception: in the photographer’s mind. As such, the photographs in this series are idiosyncratic visual investigations of the specific plants we encountered. The images magnify our gaze of these plants, first through the instrument of the camera and lens, but also through the complex manipulation of their production and post-production process. The portraits of Homegrown are as much a portrayal of the artist’s conversation about plants of the Cayman Islands as they are a record of the subjects taken.”
