Note · 4 July 2026
[ku] 21/26 Art
Study sheets for plants that never existed.
Study sheet, Mycoteuthis silvatica · Whole, detail, and cross section · EDEN, Roman Thomas
Alongside the forest images of EDEN stands a herbarium. Study sheets of a flora that looks documented and yet is entirely invented.
The Same Flora, from the Other Direction
In the forest images of EDEN you encounter the beings fleetingly, half hidden, half already elsewhere. In the herbarium they lie open before you. Lifted out of the forest, set down on light paper, with root, leaf, and cross section, the way a species is documented in an old botanical atlas. The same invented nature, once in the act of vanishing, once held still.
An Atlas Is a Promise
A botanical atlas promises that what it shows exists. I take exactly that promise and turn it around. My sheets carry everything that makes a document credible. Several views of the same being, a detail, a cross section, calm light, a name. Only the plant itself never existed.
Whoever looks closely stumbles for a moment. Is this a study, a scientific plate, a drawing, or an invention. That uncertainty is intended. It is the same uncertainty people felt around 1900 in the face of photography, when the Lüßwald was being documented for local history and the camera was trusted blindly. Except that today the machine no longer depicts. It invents.
A Taxonomy That Does Not Exist
The beings are not arbitrary. They arrange themselves as if a taxonomy stood behind them. Deep-sea botany, membrane ferns, fruiting bodies, drifting beings. I gave them names, half Latin, as in real botany, so that they take their place in an order no one has ever written down.
Five of Them Actually Lie Before You
Five of the sheets are printed, as fine art prints on Hahnemühle William Turner, a rough, warm paper that gives the whole the feel of an old atlas. In the exhibition you can come as close to them as you would to a real herbarium sheet, and still something is not right. The work lives precisely in that hesitation.
EDEN and the herbarium are on view starting this weekend in the exhibition QUO VADIS ARS. Is AI the End of Art? at the Albert-König-Museum Unterlüß, from July 5 to October 11, 2026.