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27/2: Exclusive perfomance and artist talk by Diana Scherer

The sowing season is on at Droog. If you have not noticed yet, since a few weeks grass is growing on our gallery floor. This grass will be moved in a performance called Harvest on Thursday the 27th of February. After the performance, Diana Scherer will give an an exclusive artist talk in de gallery of Droog.

Programme

16:30 Doors open
17:00 Performance Harvest 
17:30 Break 
17:45 Artist Talk by Diana Scherer
19:00 End 

In the solo exhibition Hyper Rhizome Diana Scherer presents thirteen new works. Interweaving Scherer’s ongoing study of plant root systems, this exhibition presents a layered examination of how biological material can be transformed into sustainable textile. From a root-bound maxi dress to a knotted radicle tapestry, the exhibition explores the human-nature relationship and our compulsion to control our natural environment.

ABOUT DIANA SCHERER 

Diana Scherer is a visual artist living and working in Amsterdam.  She was born in Lauingen in Germany and studied fine art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her practice encompasses photography, material research, plant-root weaving and sculpture. Her works have been exhibited in several international solo and group shows. Recent examples include Earth Matters at the Textile Museum Tilburg (2017); the Tasis 2019 Art & Science exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing, Spring Tide at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam (2017); and A Queen Within – Adorned Archetypes at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2018). Her work Rootbound # 2, a dress grown from plant roots, is currently featured in the exhibition Fashioned from Nature at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and Shenzhen. She received Rotterdam-based Het Nieuwe Instituut’s 2016 New Material Fellow for her work Interwoven.

Exhibition ‘Hyper Rhizome’ by Diana Scherer

From Sunday the 19th of January until 24th of Februari 2020

Gallery@droog

Staalstraat 7B, Amsterdam

Open Daily from 9.00 AM – 19.00 PM

In the solo exhibition Hyper Rhizome Diana Scherer shares with us a selection of growing objects, scientific research and plantrootweaving. For this installation she grew various wall hangings from roots.The new work is the continuation of the project Exercises in Rootsystem Domestication.

Charles Darwin was the first to watch the behaviour of roots. 
In his book The Power of Movements of Plants, he describes how roots do not passively grow down, but move and observe. A root navigates, knows what’s up and down, observes gravity and localizes moisture and chemicals. Darwin discovered that plants are a lot more intelligent, than everybody thought. For contemporary botanists, this buried matter is still a wondrous land. There is a global investigation to discover this hidden world. Scherer approaches the root system as if it were yarn. For example, the refined, white root structure of grass reminds her of silk and the powerful, yellowish strands of the daisy she compares to wool.  She developed a technique to control the growth of plant roots and with Hyper Rhizome the natural network of the root system turns into a textile. 

Diana explores the relationship of man versus his natural environment and his desire to control nature. The living material forms the basis of her investigation. She works with biological processes and develops her work by making interventions, both intuitively or by scientific means. Exercises in Rootsystem Domestication originated as an art project with an intuitive approach. It has also developed into an innovative material research and pursuit for a new and suistainable textile. Working on this project Scherer shifts between disciplines, from design to art, craft and science. To develop this biotechnique she collaborates with biologists and engineers from TU Delft Materials Experience Lab and Radboud University Nijmegen.

More about Diana Scherer

The project & exhibition is supported by Bank Giro Loterij FondsTU Delft, Mondriaanfonds, FondsKwadraat and Radboud Univerity Nijmegen.

On view: Opinion Cooler by Pauline Perrin

Are you yourself online? Visual artist Pauline Perrin uses a series of selfportraits to answer that question. Through digitally enhanced photography, she shows how media blurs our notion of reality, yet gives space vulnerability. On view until 12th of January in our gallery @droog!