Beth Galton Studio

I am a photo-based artist, with an educational background in the natural sciences and 30 years of experience as a professional photographer in the editorial and commercial world. My personal practice brings these elements of my history together, in an effort to reimagine the classic 19th-century botanical drawing, as means of investigating the nature of time, through organic forms.

I begin my process by carefully selecting visually interesting plants at farmer’s markets and flower markets and bringing them back to my studio. Here I work with the organic material I have collected in a variety of ways. For some series, I arrange plant-life into living collages for the camera, often juxtaposing them with an assortment of symbols of scientific imperialism, as a means of exploring the ideas that shape our understanding of the natural world. For other series, I store my specimens and wait patiently, observing them as they change. I find these natural objects always change with time, sometimes into abstract forms. In these instances, I wait until their shape seems ripe for the camera and, I document them individually. I compose each specimen in a way that allows it to take on its own human-like persona. In all my series, my assemblages and portraits connect the viewer to the ecological cycles of the natural world, including their own aging and mortality.