Curated by Harry Woodlock
With the support of British Council
In collaboration with Konrad Fischer Galerie
For over fifteen years, Alice Channer, a leading contemporary British artist, has been making sculpture that represents nature in various states of transformation. Megaflora, 2021, is a sand-cast aluminium bramble stem that has been extracted via three-dimensional scan and stretched vertically into a three-meter-high freestanding sculptural form, and is presented here outside, in the Giardino di Ingresso of Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia, for the very first time.
By way of scale or material, Channer transmogrifies the form, nature or appearance of the flora and fauna that makes up our natural world, in a surprising, and oftentimes magical, manner. In this sense her work speaks directly to the Museum’s rich, varied and fragile zoological, paleontological and botanical collections and its evocative layout for discovering the secrets of nature and living beings. At the same time, it is also a comment on the way in which our environment has transformed, or adapted to, the human activity that has led to today’s climate crisis and the unprecedented threat capitalism is posing to nature.
For the first time, the sculpture is presented in an outdoor setting, powerfully showcasing the monumental evocative strength and the captivating ambiguity inherent in Channer’s work. Her art consistently operates at the boundary between the real and the artificial, between nature and its reconstruction using industrial materials, technology, or precious metals.
Alice Channer. Megaflora will examine the way in which the artist uses form so as to emphasise the violence of the current phenomenon of change, the protection it might be said to symbolise, and how we might rethink that which constitutes vulnerability today. This installation will be accompanied by a brand new publication, with contributions from authors such as art writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck.
