Chlorophyll Power
This image comes compliments of Creative Review. British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey were commissioned by HSBC Bank to make this work for 2008 Wimbledon Tennis Championships. They are using the light sensitive properties of grass in conjunction with projected negatives to create these temporary artworks. So they basically use an indirect stencil process to create these pieces. The post at CR Blog explains the process…
“When grass gets plenty of sunlight, it produces chlorophyll and therefore turns green – but the less light it receives, the more yellow the colour is,” explains JWT art director Mark Norcutt of the process used to make the work. “Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey discovered that by projecting a bright black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows (in an otherwise dark room), they can use the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs. From a distance it looks like any other monochrome photograph (albeit with a slightly unusual tint); up close, it looks like perfectly ordinary grass. But even individual blades sometimes have a range of hues, as any given cell can respond to the amount of light it receives.”
It’s a little surprising that Wimbledon that would have commissioned public artwork but apparently it is the only Grand Slam tennis tournament still using grass which makes the collaborators’ work a logical choice. The husband/wife team’s work brings together their interests in art, science, and the environment. From their 2001 exhibition at the Gardner Museum in Boston…
Through their work with grass as a photographic medium, Ackroyd and Harvey are fostering a heightened collaboration among the artistic and scientific communities. The two have worked closely with leading scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) in Wales. IGER has helped the artists develop their work through the application of a “stay-green” grass that extends the life of their grass canvases. “Our understanding of the molecular events of leaf death have been greatly enhanced through our relationship with scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research,” says Ackroyd.
More works by Ackroyd and Harvey can be found here.
UPDATE: Here is a pic of the negative thanks to Inhabitat.
