Photo courtesy of Ackroyd & Harvey.
Usually when you say an artist is “into grass,” it’s because you’re in your 60s and use outdated drug slang. But artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey honestly do amazing things with grass, i.e. the plant people make lawns out of. They’ve used grass to coat the inside of a church and the outside of a theater. But for my money, their coolest project involves printing photographs onto living grass.
Photo courtesy of Ackroyd & Harvey.
Ackroyd and Harvey expose growing grass to different amounts of light, so that the blades produce varying concentrations of chlorophyll. It’s exactly like exposing treated paper to light in order to print a photo — the parts that receive more light come out darker. Because they manipulate the chlorophyll rather than just painting or bleaching the grass, the image goes all the way to the roots. As the grass grows, the photograph actually gets clearer. (And then, of course, eventually goes brown and dies.)
What you end up with is a poignant commentary on the way humans project our image onto the natural world — or something. I’m no art critic. But I feel pretty qualified to say that this is rad.
