Artworks

Specimen Drawing Exercise

In 1705, G.E. Rumphius documented the flora of the South Asian archipelago in Herbarium Amboinense, where Dutch, Malay, Portuguese, and Latin intertwined to form a linguistic map of knowledge — and a colonial archive. Within his descriptions, plants were classified, named, and domesticated, yet at times revealed their own affect and agency through the fissures of language — “It opens alone at night, like a widow lighting her lamp in the dark.”

Specimen Drawing Exercise takes Rumphius’s notes as a point of departure, translating his archived words back into images. On the reverse of tempered glass, I applied silver leaf and traced, in the technique of verre églomisé, the contours of Rumphius-like botanical forms, allowing light and reflection to drift across the metallic surface. The mirrored plane becomes both a barrier and a circuit of vision: as the viewer gazes, they are reflected into a reciprocal encounter between nature and the human.

This series seeks to re-summon the appearance of nature within the interlacing of specimen study and emotion, generating — between the colonial botanical archive and contemporary discourses of human–nonhuman coexistence — an ecological moment composed of fragments, encounters, and shared inhabitation.