Sight Unseen has a nice feature up this week about Juliette Warmenhovem who makes odd contraptions and vessesls from plastic, paper and fiberglass to celebrate the growth and nurturing of plant life in domestic space. Pictured top are a bonsai incubator, left and germination vessels on the right, including a plant cuttings holding tank and a water supply device that helps seedlings sprout. Below, a music box that twirls a potato around on a pedestal, "highlighting the hidden beauty of a potato."
Her father is a flower farmer. If it all sounds very quaint, it might have been 20 years ago -- but then tulip production went the way of the meat industry thanks to globalization, and farming became a race to create the maximum amount of homogenous bulbs in the shortest amount of time. "My father feels farming is like working in a factory now," says the Arnhem-based designer. Just as shrink-wrapped steak has been divorced from the killing of the cow, plants are more about the perfection of the end product than the actual growing process. "I believe that when you explain that process to people, they get more feeling out of it," she says. For Everyday Growing, her graduation project at Arnhem's ArtEZ school this January, she built a series of small monuments to plants' humble -- and often imperfect -- origins.
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