Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Pamela Wolfe, The Entangled Bank
Artis Gallery
Until November 27
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
In the catalogue accompanying her recent exhibition The Entangled bank Pamela Wolfe quotes from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
Later in life when Darwin retired to the country where he took an intense interest in botany acquiring specimens and corresponding with other botanists. He was particularly interested in the question of why flowers had developed their many shapes, sizes and colours.
The plants depicted in Wolfe’s exhibition could well have been ones which Darwin might have grown and examined in his gardens.
Wolfe has a similar enquiring mind about the plants she paints and there is a Romantic quality to them. In her introduction to the works, she mentions her early encounters with plants – “I recall walking through a tangled mass of wildflowers and towering weeds that bordered a large meadow near a small English village in spring”. It’s a description which was similar to the lines of Wordsworth.
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Entangled ($24,000) is a reference to Wolfe’s quote from The Origin of Species with the dark centre to the work giving a sense of damp earth.
Other works have references to Darwin’s interest in tropical plants which he raised in his hothouse at Down House such as Tropical 1 ($19,500) and Tropical 2 ($22,000) with bright amaryllis and other exotic plants.
Dark Orchid ($24,000) is also an acknowledgement of Darwin’s work in collecting these exotic plants.
While the plants in Variation ($19.500) are clearly arranged in a vase, the other works present the plants as though they are specimens arranged for study.
With most of the paintings the plants are carefully modelled emphasising contrasts in colour, shapes and texture. Wolfe has depicted the voluptuous petals of the blooming flowers and buds in tightly cropped masses almost filling the frame as with Entangled and Late Summer Echinacea and Zinnias ($19,500).
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