Mark Dion: "Neukom Vivarium"

 
"Neukom Vivarium," 2006
Mixed-media installation, greenhouse structure: 80 feet long. Installation view: Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

ART21: Tell us something about the backstory of the tree used in your installation, Neukom Vivarium.

DION: On the evening of February 8, 1996, a massive hemlock tree fell over a ravine in a small area of old growth about forty-five miles outside Seattle, in a protected watershed area. Therefore, it didn’t touch the ground and rot away as quickly as it would have.

ART21: How did you choose this particular tree?

DION: We did a great deal of searching and were relieved to find a tree that not only had a lot of personality but that was big and reasonably accessible. We were really interested in getting either a Douglas fir or a Western Hemlock. The Douglas fir has a kind of mythic presence here. The Western Hemlock is also an incredibly charismatic, wonderful tree—and it’s the state tree. So, those were the two species we were most interested in. This one had just fallen into our lap. It’s under the stewardship of a very enlightened watershed program. So, we just found the right tree at the right place.

ART21: What does it mean to take a tree from its natural setting and place it in a gallery context?

DION: I think that one of the important things about this work is that it’s really not an intensely positive, back-to-nature kind of experience. In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem—a dead tree, but a living system—and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we’re building around it. And we’re pumping it up with a life support system—an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement—to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does, emphasizing how, once that’s gone, it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system—to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it. So, this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system, it’s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense, we’re building a failure.

ART21: It’s interesting that you’d want to put your efforts into a failure.

DION: I’m very committed to an idea of art making that is based on an experimental model. So, this is an experiment—and experiments fail and succeed. They prove and disprove things. There are a lot of variables and we cannot predict everything. And we’re going to have an amazingly furtive learning experience.
I’m interested in thinking about nature as a process. So, this isn’t really about the tree, even though the tree is the superstar. It’s really about what’s happening to the tree, about the process of decay. We shouldn’t really feel particularly bound up in the demise of this tree because on this tree is the basis of the next forest. The tree supports a living bio-system, from single-cell organisms all the way up to vertebrates—mice, shrews, and birds. I want this piece to talk to the audience but not necessarily spoon-feed them or give them what they want. I want to acknowledge or even enhance the uncanniness of nature—the wonder of the vast complexity and diversity within a natural system.

ART21: Can you say more about what you mean by not necessarily giving your audience what they want?

DION: My job as an artist isn’t to satisfy the public. That’s not what I do. I don’t necessarily make people happy. I think the job of an artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention. A big flaw in some public art schemes is that they seem to be about trying to find an artist who’s going to please everyone. That’s not interesting to me. I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to.

ART21: How does Neukom Vivarium politically engage your audience?

DION: I’m not sure there is a really succinct way to talk about how this piece politically engages people. In a sense, what I’m doing is bringing a forgotten element of the environment back into the city. I’m taking something that would have existed on that site a long time ago and returning it to that site. But, at the same time, I’m building a cultural framework around it.
One of the things that’s difficult about this piece is that it’s hard to locate where the work is. It’s not the tree, and it’s not the building, and it’s not the details like the tiles or the field guide. But it’s really the entire thing. Of course, people tend to focus on the tree, as though the other thing was just a frame, but it’s really an integrated work. It’s not a piece of architecture; it’s a work of art. It’s a total artwork.

ART21: Was there any particular artistic inspiration for this work?

DION: I feel very much connected to the Hudson River School painters and other people of that tradition. That school of painting evolved into the modern school of abstract painters—from Cape Cod right through to earthworks and people like Robert Smithson. I see that as an unbroken chain. Our relationship to the landscape is a strong element in the history of American art because it is remarkably distinct from the European perspective of landscape.

We have always had a notion of wilderness. Of course, that notion has changed dramatically over time. The Hudson River School dealt with it not only in a political way but also in a theological sense. The Hudson River School painters were mostly incredibly religious men who saw this as a kind of expression of their faith. I’m a secular person; I’m not a person of faith. At the same time, I see that my cosmology is really based on science. So, this work has a dialogue with science, as most of my work does. And I think that was true for the Hudson River people as well. Their engagement with travel, their relationship to spectacle and scale—all of those things are built into the way that a number of contemporary artists work with these kinds of issues, myself included. Though for us, it comes through the filter of earth art as well. Earth art added the ingredient of contemporary environmental science. The earth artists weren’t necessarily very environmentally oriented and certainly not very conservation oriented. Some of the stuff that I’m doing really involves a political discourse added onto the conceptual elements that the earth artists were interested in.

ART21: What are some of these conceptual elements?

DION: I think that we’re really talking about systems, and it’s interesting the way that people involved in conceptual art practices were always engaged in systems, whether they were exchange systems or natural systems. An artist like Hans Haacke started off working with natural systems and then applied that to the social realm.
This work engages with a lot of systems that are natural. We’re putting this tree into something like a showroom, a classroom, a laboratory. It makes reference to greenhouses and the history of greenhouses. It’s an incredibly interesting hybrid space. But at the same time, it’s very inclusive. People are allowed to go in. They’re allowed to spend time with it. It’s a space that has a very fantastical element, too, with an almost Bernini-like forced perspective. If you don’t feel a little bit like you’re Alice falling through the rabbit hole when you walk through the door, then we’ve made a mistake.
In some way, I want to acknowledge or even enhance the uncanniness of nature and the wonder of the vast complexity and diversity within a natural system. I want to show how difficult it is for us to grasp, not just conceptually but also practically. How difficult it is for us to figure in all of the variables that you would need to replicate a forest. We’re trying, but we can never do it perfectly. That’s one of the most interesting aspects of the piece for me.

ART21: It’s almost like seeing a tree hooked up to a life support system.

DION: As I said, this is not exactly a feel-good work of art. You should look at this and get the impression of someone in the hospital under an oxygen tent. There should be pangs of melancholy when you see this. Of course, it is in some ways a celebration, but at the same time, it’s full of mourning and melancholy. This tree is something fantastic that has been ripped out of its context. So, there is something monstrous and violent about the very nature of this work. Like, in a natural history museum, you find this feeling of awe toward the skill of the reproduction and, at the same time, a feeling of terror at the tragedy of people killing animals and reproducing them for an urban audience. That’s very much the kind of logic that I’m playing with here.

ART21: The work also functions as a memento mori.

DION: It is a memento mori—an appreciation of decay as a process and as a tool for discourse.

From here.

The larva of a Green lacewing. They pack their dorsal surface with lichens. On warmer fall and winter days I often find them on the sunny side of trees. They move around pretty quickly with a jerky kind of movement. When they are disturbed they roll up into a tight little ball.

 

Juliette Losq

 

Juliette Losq first came about in 2005 when she won the Jerwood drawing prize. Since then she has gone on to release several exhibitions such as “Life of wood” in Seoul, back in 2009 and “Lucaria” At Theodore Art in New York in 2012. She’s even became a member of the Newhall Womens Art Collection and The Saatchi Collection.

hifructose.com said “It is all part of an illusion meant to preserve an almost forgotten past.”
Fas London said “Losq conjures her own unique landscapes where we feel at our most safe yet most vulnerable: stray too close to the edge and the forest may snatch you into its depths”

I have also recently seen Losq's work at the John Moores Painting Prize 2014, Vinculum, although I didn't realise it was the same artist who had created the drawings above. Her painting is from a series depicting the overgrown exteriors of derelict buildings. She creates her works by first doing an etching and then overlaying it with watercolour paint. However, I feel that her drawings above hold more relevance to me, as it shows a more unique and unusual way for me to consider displaying my drawings within a space.

BioArt

BioArt is an art practice where humans work with live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, and life processes. Using scientific processes such as biotechnology (including technologies such as genetic engineering, tissue culture, and cloning) the artworks are produced in laboratories, galleries, or artists' studios. The scope of BioArt is considered by some artists to be strictly limited to “living forms”, while other artists would include art that uses the imagery of contemporary medicine and biological research, or require that it address a controversy or blind spot posed by the very character of the life sciences.

Although BioArtists work with living matter, there is some debate as to the stages at which matter can be considered to be alive or living. Creating living beings and practicing in the life sciences brings about ethical, social, and aesthetic inquiry. The phrase "BioArt" was coined by Eduardo Kac in 1997 in relation to his artwork Time Capsule. Although it originated at the end of the 20th century through the works of pioneers like Joe Davis and artists at SymbioticA, BioArt started to be more widely practiced in the beginning of the 21st century.

BioArt is often intended to be shocking or humorous. One survey of the field in Isotope: A Journal of Literary Science and Nature Writing puts it this way: "BioArt is often ludicrous. It can be lumpy, gross, unsanitary, sometimes invisible, and tricky to keep still on the auction block. But at the same time, it does something very traditional that art is supposed to do: draw attention to the beautiful and grotesque details of nature that we might otherwise never see."

While raising questions about the role of science in society, "most of these works tend toward social reflection, conveying political and societal criticism through the combination of artistic and scientific processes."

While most people who practice BioArt are categorized as artists in this new media, they can also be seen as scientists, since the actual medium within a work pertains to molecular structures, and so forth. Because of this dual-acceptance, the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard University invites anyone to submit works based on scientific or artistic value. This can encourage anyone to submit work they strongly respond to.

Building Flowers

An architecture graduate constructs intricate botanical illustrations using the computer graphics programs intended to design buildings.

A SCREENSHOT FROM A VIDEO PRODUCED BY PANASONIC HOLLYWOOD LABS (PHL) FEATURING MURAYAMA'S WORK

What’s the difference between a 100-story skyscraper towering over a bustling metropolis and a 2-inch flower blooming in the countryside? To architecture-student-turned-artist Macoto Murayama, not a whole lot.

“[The flower] is organic and is rather different from architecture [in that way],” Murayama writes in an email (translated by Rodion Trofimchenko, a curator at the Frantic Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, where Murayama shows his work). “[But] when I looked closer into a plant that I thought was organic, I found in its form and inner structure, hidden mechanical and inorganic elements.”
Intrigued, Murayama began applying the computer graphics programs and techniques he had learned while studying architecture at Miyagi University of Education in Sendai to illustrate, in meticulous detail, the anatomy of flowers. After choosing a flower, purchased at the flower shop or picked up on the side of a road, he carefully dissects it, cutting off its petals with a scalpel and extracting the ovary and other internal structures. He then sketches what he sees, photographs it, and models it on the computer using 3dsMAX software, a program typically used by architects and animators. Finally, he creates a composition of the different parts in Photoshop, and uses Illustrator to add measurements and other labels.

A flower in the process of being disected by Murayama.

Macoto Murayama COURTESY OF FRANTIC GALLERY

 

“His images are very beautiful,” says Linda Ann Vorobik, a professional botanical illustrator affiliated with the Herbarium at University of California, Berkeley, and University of Washington, Seattle. “He’s trying to present a scientific illustration style to show the various details, but then he’s spinning it with a lot of techniques that are dependent upon high-tech tools to create images that are pleasing to the eye.”
Curator Trofimchenko first saw Murayama’s work at the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi Exhibition in 2009. “It was, of course, not as strong as [his] recent works, but anyway outstanding: contemporary media, explicit union of tradition and experiment, and obvious root of that image in personal interest (obsession) of its author,” Trofimchenko writes in an email. Impressed, he and Frantic Gallery director Yasunobu Miyazaki approached Murayama at the opening reception and asked if he’d be interested in showing his art in the gallery.

Murayama completed his BA in spatial design at Miyagi University and a post-graduate degree in media expression at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS). In addition to working on his art, he holds a part time job at a flower shop, running deliveries and assisting with production, design, and photography.

“The reason I am working at the flower shop is that I cannot support myself only with my art works, which is a negative side, but I can also see how people who deal with flowers and plants, think about them, how they perceive them, which is a positive side,” Murayama says. “I am sure that in the future this experience will come to live in my thinking and my works.”

Murayama says his current illustrations are purely an “artistic expression,” but he could see turning to more scientific endeavors down the road. Vorobik isn’t sure if his style will be easily accepted by the scientific community, however. “The reality in publication is that the bottom line matters,” she says. “For so many years, line drawings have been the cheapest way to illustrate stuff. It’s a matter of efficient cost.”

Bio Art: An Overview of New Media’s Thriving Sibling. by Hannah Collman

 

The term “New Media” is expanding, since its emergence out of Pop Art, Fluxus, and other earlier movements, to mean many things. It is digital, it is interactive, it is dynamic, it is animated, it is dangerously hactivist…it is an expression of changing times and cultures, of the horizon called the future coming closer to us. One particular instance of New Media which has branched out into its own discipline is “Bio Art,” such as that practiced by British artist Jane Prophet in her project Silver Heart, seen below.

Bio Art relates not only to biological sciences, but to engineering, robotics, and architecture, which follow the same structural principles  in building complex forms. One example of architectural influence in Bio Art is the work of Macoto Murayama, a graduate student from Miyagi University of Education who uses his  expertise to create beautiful, fluid forms like flowers. In speaking of the relation between the plant and digital technology, he notes:

“[The flower] is organic and is rather different from architecture [in that way][...][But] when I looked closer into a plant that I thought was organic, I found in its form and inner structure, hidden mechanical and inorganic elements.” (The Scientist, p.1). The two worlds are, after all, not so separate. Nature and technology merge ever more seamlessly with the integration of various disciplines into New Media Art.

The term Bio Art was first coined by Eduardo Kac, an American artist born in Brazil. Kac is well versed in the fields of biotechnology and genetics, and employs his expertise in various art projects to critique said fields of study, along with scientific techniques in general. A good example of this strategy is Kac’s first “transgenic” piece, “Genesis.” This work is not only an expansion of the realm of Bio Art, but of art as a complicated series of processes leading to a perhaps far less complicated end result. In Genesis, the “art” lies mainly in the concept and execution: the display is merely gloss.  Kac takes this quote from the Bible: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” and turns it into Morse Code. He translates that information into the base pairs, A-T, G-C of the fundamental double helix DNA structure, then turns them into the theoretical genetic sequences which would be created from that data, then implants that genetic material into bacteria and swabs the entire amalgamation onto a petri dish.

Viewers (via webcam) are given the option to turn on a UV light above the dish, triggering mutation and destroying the fragile links between the quote and the organisms if they disagree with the statement therein expressed.  However, in doing so they themselves exert dominace over nature, contradicting their initial perspective. The art lies in the dichotomous choice a viewer must make, whether to change what he does not agree with, or conversely, be passive about that which he holds true (for those accepting the statement would not wish to manipulate the bacteria and destroy the statement). It addresses the gap between human reason and action. For instance, how does one uphold pacifism? One cannot force an invading army to stop killing, while upholding a rule of no fighting.

Such questions, and many other interesting dilemmas, are at the forefront of exploration in Bio Art.

It is a strange direction to take, and a strangely inverted view of the world: that the internal workings and functions of objects such as flowers or the human body should be their celebrated components, rather than the outer forms so praised by artists of the past, is a perspective not merely strange, but contentious to many. It will be interesting to see where Bio Art, and the rest of the broadly expanding behemoth that is New Media, goes next.

References:

http://www.janeprophet.com/2011/09/rapid-prototype-sculpture-art-3d-printer-polymer-algorithn-silver-heart-2004/

http://the-scientist.com/2012/02/16/building-flowers/

http://ekac.org/geninfo2.html

John Kalymnios

John Kalymnios

Butterflies

2012

butterfly, motor, aluminum

11 1/2 inches x 12 inches x 38 inches

Another work:

John Kalymnios, Untitled (Butterfly) (detail), 2003

29 butterflies mounted on aluminum, motors, each 4 1/2 X 6 inches, variable heights

Collection of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Kalymnios does not merely deconstruct nature, he perfects it. He extracts from it the reverie and serenity it can bring us in our most elevating encounters with it, and then frees it from the deterioration of time by adding mechanical elements. On occasion, Kalymnios's kinetic sculptures even resurrect nature, as with Untitled (Butterfly) (2003) in which 29 dead butterflies are given new life. As miraculous as the new life from the cocoon in nature may be, it is fleeting; Kalymnios, however, allows the miracle to live on by animating the insects with the help of motorized wires. What results is a flock of iridescent butterflies moving their delicate wings in a simulation of flight, long after their demise. Kalymnios's ability to eternalize the new life of the butterfly recalls Yeats's line, “Once out of nature, I shall never take my bodily form from any living thing/but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make … set upon a golden bough to sing … of what is past, passing, or to come.”  

From here.

Cedric Laquieze

Amsterdam-based artist Cedric Laquieze (previously featured here) recently completed a fascinating new series of his exquisite taxidermy Fairies. These delicate sculptures are primarily composed of parts from many different insect species, but if you look closely you’ll notice bones, seeds and even a few scorpion parts as well.

More here: http://laquiezecedric.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/fairies-2014.html

Ferraria Crispa

 

 

The bizarre Ferraria crispa - the "Starfish Iris" - looks like it crawled out of the sea. This rare Iris relative from South Africa has beautifully intricate blooms with frilly edges. Ferraria crispa is a winter-growing bulb that flowers in spring, then goes dormant for the summer. Its attractive leaves emerge from small corms in autumn.  The leaves grow about a foot tall and have a thick, fleshy texture.  In late winter or early spring, the 1½ inch flowers appear. 

  

Fist looking at these flowers, they appear to be some kind of flower-coral hybrid. I have seen the ruffled edges described as being barnacle like, which I can really see. To me, they almost look "ornate" with their elaborate and highly decorative patterns and colours. 

Hubert Duprat

Trichoptera (caddis larva) building case (studio view), 1980-2000. Material: Gold, pearls, turquoise. Length: 2.5 cm. Photographer: Frédéric Delpech. Image courtesy of the artist and Art:Concept gallery, Paris and MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Right now, in almost every river in the world, some 12,000 different species of caddisfly larvae wriggle and crawl through sediment, twigs, and rocks in an attempt to build temporary aquatic cocoons. To do this, the small, slow-moving creatures excrete silk from salivary glands near their mouths which they use like mortar to stick together almost every available material into a cozy tube. A few weeks later a fully developed caddisfly emerges and almost immediately flies away.

After first learning about caddisflies, self-taught (and self-professed amateur) artist Hubert Duprat had a thought. Had a caddisfly ever naturally encountered a fleck of gold in a river and used it to build a home? And then one step further: what if a caddisfly had only gold and other precious stones or jewels to work with?

Trichoptères, French for the scientific name of the caddisfly, is Duprat’s answer to that question. For years the artist has been collaborating with the tiny insects, providing them small aquariums of gold, turquoise and pearls that the the larvae readily use to construct their temporary homes. Regardless of how creepy crawly you might find the insects, it’s impossible to deny the strange beauty of the final product, tiny gold sculptures held together with silk. Encountering them void of any context, one would assume they were constructed by a jeweler.

Duprat currently has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania which runs through July 28th, and it should be notced thath is work with caddisflies is only one small aspect of his art practice.

Trichoptera larva with case, 1980-2000. Material: gold and pearls. Dimension: 0.5 x 1.9 cm. Photographer: Frédéric Delpech. Image courtesy of the artist and Art:Concept gallery, Paris and MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Trichoptera larva with case, 1980-2000. Material: gold and pearls. Dimension: 0.5 x 1.9 cm. Photographer: Frédéric Delpech. Image courtesy of the artist and Art:Concept gallery, Paris and MONA Museum of Old and New Art.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case on pedestal. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case on pedestal. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

Trichoptera (caddis larva) case on pedestal. Photographer: Fabrice Gousset.

From here.

Lindsay Feuer

Artist website

Suspended in the realm between reality and fantasy, my sculptures explore the organic process of growth, replication, and locomotion.
 
Deliberately ambiguous combinations of biological imagery reflect the perfect integration of form and function found in the natural world. Through an intuitive process, I allow these elements to respond to one another, creating “hybrid” forms with movement and fluidity.

Porcelain is an ideal medium for my work because its white luminescence showcases rich surfaces and curvilinear components.The strength and responsiveness of this clay also enables me to achieve whimsical and delicate sculptural elements. Hidden building techniques allow my sculptures to exist in a space of seamless illusion where they appear “born” rather than “made.” Inspired by the mysteries of nature, pieces deliver an animated and fantastical view of our biological surroundings. I invite my audience to draw upon their experience and imagination, and to discover a unique reality for each piece. 

Lindsay Feuer is a ceramic artist born and raised outside of Philadelphia. She creates unique and whimsical porcelain sculptures inspired by organic forms in nature. These works are a “hybrid” blend of fantasy and reality executed in highly detailed unglazed porcelain.

Himalayan Balsam

 Extract from this article.

An alien plant, so bothersome that Royal Marines have been called in to try to eradicate it, and so persistent that a top laboratory is working on a biological “secret weapon” to defeat it, has been helped to invade the British countryside by a fifth column of subversive flower lovers.

The Himalayan balsam grows up to 10ft (3m) tall and has colonised large areas beside rivers and woods throughout Britain, smothering any indigenous plants. The Environment Agency, Plantlife, Wildlife Trusts and the National Trust all say the species is a headache, and its total removal could cost as much as £300m.

But, with its pink orchid-like flowers, it is also attractive to many people. It’s so attractive, in fact, that a big factor in its invasive spread is people scattering its seed in the wild, according to research by Professor Ian Rotherham of Sheffield Hallam University and author of Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals.

The upshot is that there is barely a part of lowland Britain free of this pretty menace. Fat stands of it clog small streams in places such as Somerset, and mass on the banks of rivers and woods from Cornwall to Scotland, with Norfolk, the Isle of Wight, New Forest, Hampshire, County Durham, Yorkshire, west Cumbria, Lancashire and North and South Wales especially troubled by it. The species is so prolific near Liverpool that it is known there as “Mersey weed”. Himalayan balsam grows in almost impenetrable thickets and will bully out any other species; its plentiful nectar means that bumble bees pollinate it rather than native species, and, being an annual, it dies down, leaving riverbanks bare in winter.

 It's interesting to consider that fact that this is an invasive species, yet has spread so far because people have found it to be so attractive! Using it's flowers as a means to spread further.

A discovery on a walk turned out to be very useful!

While out on a walk to enjoy the sun while it's here, and in addition to give myself time to gather more inspiration from nature and to think about the direction I wish to take future work, I came across these flowers.

Not having much knowledge of plant identification, or wildflowers in the area, I made the assumption that based on the appearance of the flowers that they could be a species of orchid. This was based on the overall aesthetic of the flowers, the colours, patterns found on them and their seeming similarities to many orchids I have previously seen.

I didn't take any clear photographs of the leaves, I was completely captured by how beautiful and unusual I found these flowers to be, having never seen anything like it in the area, or before on any of my walks. It was like making a completely new discovery, of course it turned out to be a new discovery only for me in knowledge gained from learning about this plant. The only thing I could gather was that lots of these plants were growing amongst a similar amount of Great Willowherb plants, most of which were taller than myself.

Wanting to identify these flowers, I spent many hours using Google, finding many websites about UK wildflowers and orchids found in the wild, reverse image searching using my photographs, but found nothing that helped me identify these flowers. I thought they could be Early Purple orchids, but finding these in July when they flower at the latest in June, and very few similarities made it doubtful.

I then happened across a blog post listing many different flowers in Endon, and saw these flowers! They are not what I was expecting at all, and are called Himalayan Balsam. They are a fast growing, invasive species that can spread their hundreds of seeds with exploding seed pods reaching up to 7 meters away, thus spreading quickly. They also smother other plants and vegetation as they grow and are dubbed a problem weed in many areas where they completely take over. They did however attract a lot of bees.

Common name Himalayan balsam, Indian balsam, jumping jack, policeman's helmet
Botanical name Impatiens glandulifera
Areas affected Gardens and allotments, often those adjacent to infested riverbanks and waste places
Main causes Fast-growing annual spreading by seed
Timing Seen spring to autumn; treat in early summer 

The Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) is an erect, annual plant, with large, oblong leaves which have sharply serrated edges^. The reddish stems of the Himalayan balsam are translucent and succulent^. The leaves are also succulent and may be arranged opposite each other or in whorls of three.

Where it has been introduced, the Himalayan balsam often produces more nectar than many of the native species, making its flowers more attractive to pollinating insects than those of other plants living in close proximity. It also outcompetes native species for light and space, as its large size and high rate of reproduction facilitates rapid colonisation. The rapid growth of this species can be extremely problematic around water systems, where it can increase the rate of erosion and obstruct water flow, subsequently increasing the risk of flooding.

Wikipedia page on the Himalayan Balsam. 

 It's really interesting to discover all of this information about this plant. What I thought was a beautiful flowering plant turns out to be an extremely aggressive, invasive plant. What makes this find even more interesting to me is the ideas I have been researching and developing in previous work, such as parasitic fungi, and the ideas of subtle danger within my imagined organisms. I think this plant offers a lot of answers for me, in addition to just as many ways to further strengthen and develop my ideas further. 

I think I should really consider revisiting the site I found them, and document it fully through various methods.