Heather Ackroyd + Dan Harvey
Rice Gallery, Houston
22 January - 4 April 2004
Ackroyd + Harvey’s work embraces site-specific installation, photography, art, architecture, and landscape design. During their month long residency at Rice Gallery, the artists will create a major new work. Their medium is nature itself – thousands of grass blades will provide a highly uniform light-sensitive surface that is used to create a unique form of photography. Nurtured in carefully controlled light conditions, young grass has a remarkable capacity to produce complex images through the production of the green pigment, chlorophyll. The equivalent tonal range found in a black and white photograph is created in the grass in shades of yellow and green. In past projects, the images were derived from classical sources such as text from Dante’s Inferno, mythological scenes, or iconic portraiture. Heather Ackroyd observes: “The images have a ghostly presence; they’re sort of there and not there . . . and suggest somehow some possible state after death, which none of us know.”
The artists discovered the photosensitive quality of grass accidentally when a ladder leaning against a building they had covered with grass left its outline on the wall. They experimented with different shapes and then with photographic negatives, learning that even under proper conditions, the image stayed in the grass for only three weeks. Their interest in fixing the image for a longer period of time led to further investigation with a group of scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) in Aberystwyth, United Kingdom. The team crossbred rye grass with a trait that prevents the loss of chlorophyll once the grass is dry. This “stay-green” grass allows the artists’ work to last for years. The partnership was beneficial to both art and science. As Leslie Forbes, a BBC radio broadcaster, commented, ”Their art has deep resonances in this rapidly browning world of ours, as does the science that has extended the life of their art and made it available to the wider audience it deserves.”
RICE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
