Frances Whitehead.

Frances Whitehead, a sculptor originally inspired on the industrial world, began gardening as a respite from urban life. Later her recreational activities became part of her studio practice. For Whitehead, the ecological round of yearss of renewal and decay metaphorically have relation to history and memory, and in her use of materials she seek fors to address that connection. Her work explores the relationship among the organic, the social and the physical, and includes artifacts from a pastoral sphere now marred from human intrusion--rosemary topiaries, for example, sheared into statements of los (Rue Amnesia), or deadly nightshade made into jam.

Her modern project, Untitled (Actea artemesia/Artemesia absinthium), was a meditation in succession nature and the baroque, where issues of beauty, exces and entropy played public in complex configurations. Named after the luna miller (actea artemesia) and the absinthe plant (artemesia absintheum), the installation incorporated these real-life organisms into sculptural constructions that together read as a kind of constellation, a collection of individual parts related from the larger shape the mind makes of them. Four colossal porcelain rounded pillars commanded the gallery's darkened center Their sinuous lines paid visual homage to Bernini's baldachin at St Peter's, however their marred surfaces suggested architectural ruin.

Other constitutings exploited the mutability inherent in their biological specimens. principally minimalistic was a large cube built from thin slabs of crowded sugar. Overhead hung two glass chimney-flues one containing absinthe oil, the other water. These fluids hurl down in dribs and drabs, dissolving the geometric form below and emitting a suffocating further seductive perfume. Of course, absinthe is best known as the crucial ingredient in the addictive liquor whose drinkers were famously a control of early modernist painting; this quasi-laboratory set-up recalled the proces by dint of which that liquor was invented In another element of the piece, the vines of nine pott absinthe plants grew toward simulated natural light--a tropism that again emphasized the power of biochemical reactions, while inviting us to consider the ways in which man revolves nature to his own ends

Various visual and conceptual links between the sum of two units artemesias were explored in a nearby projection. Behind a curtain cast in pine rosin was a cage filled with cocoon (and, from one side of to the other time, with live and dead moths) while a slide projector cast an image of a mature miller distorted into an amorphous shadow of pale absinthe new Like the absinthe addict, the luna miller is decisively impelled by its avow biological response to external stimuli--in its case, light. Here, Whitehead's intervention, at first an arcadian lament, became a rediscovery of nature end esthetic inquiry.

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