Rachael Amos

Medium: Chalk pastel with touches of pastel pencil.

My work now and for the past few years has focused on the potential of seeing plant roots in the soil, both alone and in their relationship with fungi. This focus is not strictly scientific. It results in interpretive and symbolic images of roots’ function as the basis for growth and their ability to partner with fungi in creating and transporting the substances needed for growth, but also facilitating plants’ ability to communicate with one another.

One of the challenges of doing this is finding a visual equivalent of processes that in reality can only be inferred, or possibly seen using a microscope, such as roots’ uptake of minerals via their fungal partners. Another challenge is making an image that accounts for the fact that these processes occur underground.
The images that result from these considerations and others too have varying degrees of relationship to the aim of visually expressing the processes that plants and fungi undergo together. Some are more purely visual fantasias while others directly visualize the process(es) I have been considering.

A Contemporary Art Gallery