Natural Wonders

Today I’ve got two examples of artists putting Mother Nature to an artistic task. I like both of these a lot, so there is my clearly stated bias.

The first are individual leaves with images burned into them by the sun. No, that’s actually backward. The artist, Binh Danh, put negatives of the images over the leaves, and the chlorophyll under the darker parts of the negative died and became white. This isn’t a fast process. Most images need a couple of weeks to really “develop”. To preserve the leaf and the image, Danh encases them in resin. Check out some of them here.

The second example comes from the artist team Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. Like Danh, they use varying intensities of light to transfer images to greenery. Unlike Danh's individual leaves, they transfer images to big patches of grass. They are relying on a genetically modified variety of grass to pull this off. Check out some of their projects here—I think they are soooooo cool.

The thing that I think is great about these artists and what they are doing is that although their process can be distilled to something quite similar, the outcomes of their work differ greatly.