#1
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
Interwoven – Exercises in Rootsystem Domestication
Awarded with Best Dutch Book Designs 2023
For the past eight years, Scherer has focused on developing the interdisciplinary project Interwoven. This publication will discuss research, new craft and its relevance to biotechnology in addition to the artworks. Contemplative essays will play a central role in the conceptual design. Authors are Giovanni Aloi, Judith Elisabeth Weiss, Phillip Fimmano, Jiwei Zhou TU Delft and Norbert Peeters. In their essays, the five authors from the disciplines of art, design and botany reflect on the different facets of the project. In 2015, Scherer began developing the technique Interwoven from idea to material, grown dress – sculptures to large-scale installations.
https://www.japsambooks.nl/products/interwoven-diana-scherer
On the Cultural Performance of Destruction, Uprooting, Annihilation
Diana Scherer sets in motion a kind of dialectic of cultural forms and cultural behaviour in her art in the interplay of collaboration with nature and the opposing mastery over nature. She not only spreads out the lush verdant green of caring horticultural work for us to witness – but also the opposite – destroying what she tended beforehand. The carpets of grass devotedly grown by the gardener therefore hardly differ, in terms of plant physiology, from a meadow that grows naturally. Two spheres can be differentiated from one another phenomenally – one of latency and one of manifestation. The underground sphere comprises the network of roots, the sphere that is above-ground displays the abundant growth and lush verdancy. The next step of Scherer’s artistic work draws our attention to the hidden world of the roots. At the end of the growing phase follows what the artist terms ‘the harvest’, again resorting to agricultural metaphors. A radical act lies behind the harmless expression, a procedure that literally zeroes in on the roots of things – the roots are cut off and then the carpet of root systems is lifted out of the ground. The harvest of the roots presents a drastic image of the inversion of cultural history, an image that has also political implications. The domestication of plants and the associated practice of harvesting represent a key turn in the history of humankind since it began to settle the land in the neolithic revolution, literally establishing roots. In face of the impact of life depending increasingly on technology, the ruthless exploitation of the Earth as the other side of the coin of harvesting and the increase in human migration make Scherer’s artworks appear as if they were presenting the other side to the history of cultivation.
From the Essay: On Roots and Men: Interwoven Narratives in the Age of Hybrid Realities
by Judith Elisabeth Weiss and Herbert Kopp Oberste Brink
Contributing Author:
Giovanni Aloi, Chicago
Colin Huizing
Philip Fimanno Paris, New York
Judith Elisabeth Weiss & Herbert Kopp Oberste Brink, Berlin
Jiwei Zhou, Delft
Norbert Peters, Leiden
Publisher: Jap Sam Books 2023. https://www.japsambooks.nl
Design: Mainstudio https://mainstudio.com
#1
Plantrootweaving tapestry 180cm x 300cm
“Gene Cultures” MIT Museum Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
2nd October 2022 ongoing
#1
#2
#3
#4
About Giants, Gaia Dresses and Anti-Symbiosis
A conversation by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink
The art of Diana Scherer (*1971) makes the invisible visible and in the process reverses the grown orders of above and below. For example, she shows roots resting on a bale of earth at the top, while blades of grass lie at the bottom. Initially, she is intensively concerned with the material aspects of art. Over the last ten years, her preferred materials have been various types of grass, mostly oats, maize or wheat, earth, water and plastics. With the help of science, Scherer researches the growth and growing conditions of grasses and cultivates them in greenhouses. Cultivation – in its old sense of cultivation and care – does not mean allowing, but rather disciplining and shaping. Scherer also demonstrates this and thus takes us back to the beginning of human culture and civilisation. But what has grown naturally and cultivated is only one domain of her art. She goes one step further and reminds us that our dissecting-curious gaze presupposes a rupture, a damage, be it of the grown form (grass field), be it of the cultural form (vases) – a killing of the natural. Scherer’s artistic practice follows an aesthetic of interaction, and this in several respects: the interaction of natural growth processes and human interventions, of natural and culturally shaped materials, of natural forms and art forms, of art and scientific material research, botanical expertise, horticultural practice.
The elements of this interaction enter into tense relationships that communicate themselves to the viewer in disparate artistic formations of fragile beauty. Scherer’s works are thus characterised by the combination of the delicacy of green grasses and fine roots with the coarseness of artificially generated stencils, by the interplay of shaping and shattering as well as by the simultaneity of a sober scientific-prosaic gaze and poetic imagination. Her artistic beginnings lie in photography. She studied art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she also lives and works. In 2022 Diana Scherer will be a participant in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney.
https://www.kunstforum.de/artikel/diana-scherer/It’s our F***ing Backyard - Material Futures - Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 26 mei – 4 september 2022
#1
#2
#3
#4
Oranjewoud – Arcadia May 2022 - Curator Hans den Hartog Jager
With Marianna Simnett (1986, Great Britain), Charles Avery (1973, Scotland), Mercedes Azpilicueta (1981, Argentina), Diana Scherer (1979, Germany) and Erik van Lieshout (1968, The Netherlands).
