Herbarium – Merging the Real & Imagined
by Lotta Olsson
May 6th – June 12th, 2016
Herbarium – Merging the Real & Imagined is Swedish artist Lotta Olsson’s second solo exhibition at Gurari Collections. A repository of preserved and dried plant specimens, self-created herbarium’s have been a constant source of inspiration for Lotta Olsson since childhood. These investigations into nature’s surroundings inform Olsson’s artwork and illustrations. Whether a simple leaf’s delicacy and intricacies, or the silhouette of trees in winter, these influences offer a whole host of useful parts that Olsson has equipped her artistic tool-kit with. Taking her cues from these impressions, shapes and visual details, Lotta Olsson then creates her illustrated fantasy trees and flora.
After many years of collecting visual images of nature’s inventory, she has a vast resource in her self-described “digital herbarium”. Of no less importance though, are the sights, sounds, and memories from treks and travel that blend with her herbarium. Altogether, these real and imagined imprints coalesce into delicate and bold imaginative illustrations.
Having grown up in southern Sweden, surrounded by forest and nature, Olsson is intimate with the natural habitat. Being a student and observer of the forest she investigates the writing and the history of old sayings as they pertain to trees and the natural world.
An herbarium is a repository of preserved and labeled plant specimens, arranged to allow easy access and archival storage. The specimens are typically in the form of herbarium sheets: pressed and dried plants that have been glued or sewn to a sheet of heavy paper together with a data label.
Swedish illustrator Lotta Olsson (b. 1982) is known for her unique interpretation of nature that translates into imaginative images of trees. Born in Ängelholm in Southern Sweden to a family with close connections to the forest, Lotta’s work has always had a strong relationship with nature. Since she was a child, she has been collecting herbariums that have later on expanded into a digital collection of not only plants and flowers, but visual memoires of moments and travels.
Lotta Olsson’s trees and imaginative forests are not bound by rules, not even by the rules of nature, but by their visuality. “I am very fascinated by trees. One little leaf can be an art piece, and a naked tree in the winter is like a sculpture,” she says. “Nature is wild and free and, to me, it is about shapes and visual details, not systems or a scientific approach. When I create a tree, only my fantasy creates the borders.”
