Teresa Stanley
Teresa Stanley looks to our connection with the natural world in this time of environmental instability and how we are often suffused with a romantic longing for connection, leading us to fill our domestic interiors and gardens with plants. Teresa values plants for their beauty but is also impressed with how clever they are at adapting to changes in their environment, communicating via their root systems and developing characteristics that ensure their survival. Despite this apparent resiliency, plant species are disappearing at an extinction rate that is 500 times faster than would be without human influence. Some plants exist only as commercially grown products in gardening centres, their counterpoints in the wild having long vanished.
In her recent series of paintings and works on paper, Stanley uses images of plants that are extinct or very rare or who are simply strange hybrids that spring from her imagination. They are either depicted as part of an imaginary greenhouse, where they are being sheltered, or they are depicted as voids surrounded by the noise and chaos of the outside world. These scenarios can also be seen as reflecting our own precarious position within the ecosphere.
Check out Teresa’s work below!