Part of a country-wide initiative to conserve significant swathes of rural landscape, in 1959 nearly half of Dorset was officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Growing up in the county, which additionally is home to England’s only natural World Heritage Site in the Jurassic Coast, Gina Buenfeld-Murley has long been privy to the countryside’s embrace, and its impact has markedly shaped her practice as a curator. “I’ve always been compelled by the natural world,” she offers. “There’s just an abundance of beauty there. I'm really moved by the patterns, and although we might understand them as superficial – as decoration – for me, they indicate a deep intelligence in nature. It presents itself so you can read it.”
Moving to London for her studies – she received her MA in Art History (20th Century) from Goldsmiths College in 2004, later becoming director at Alison Jacques Gallery – this preoccupation with the natural world is most pronounced in The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree, an exhibition-cum-digital archive Gina established in 2020 at Camden Art Centre, where she’s been exhibitions curator since 2009. Following a sabbatical in 2017, during which she travelled to the Amazon rainforest to observe how local communities engaged with their immediate surroundings (much of it through art, she notes), she endeavoured to interrogate what this meant closer to home. “The exhibition was inspired by indigenous cosmologies and questions about indigeneity, about really being part of a place,” she explains. “I was mesmerised, in the Amazon, with this sense that people were not imposing themselves on the landscape, but living in harmony with it.”
Reflecting on the cultural understanding of this relationship in the UK and elsewhere in the West, Gina recalls being struck by the supremacy of materialism. “I don’t just mean consumerism, but the entire understanding of life is thought of in material terms. So I started trying to retrieve a sense of indigeneity here, thinking about the traditions that relate us to the land that we may have lost. Then looking at artists that similarly use plant, music and pattern as a way of uncovering this lived, connective experience of being in the world,” she says. Featuring work by Penny Slinger, Ernst Haeckel and Josef Albers, as well as artists from the Yawanawá community, The Botanical Mind develops ideas Gina had previously begun exploring with independent projects at Musée Wäinö Aaltonen in Finland (Origin Story) and Cornwall’s Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange (Gäa: Holistic Science and Wisdom Tradition), both in 2019.
“I remember one particular event, I was walking with my husband and had a leaf in my hand,” she continues, honing in on an anecdote that speaks to this correlation between her personal and professional lives, and how she marries the two. “It was early spring, and this leaf was a perfect leporello, like a green tissue which had just unfolded. I said to him, ‘How is it possible? This is created from sunlight and water, a few nutrients in the soil.’ It just struck me that there's a much more profound meaning in what is objectively there – a kind of spiritual truth that's hiding in plain sight. That really became the rubric of this research, thinking beyond what is immediately apparent.”
The desire to foster this interest in a more substantial way within her arts practice, alongside a sense that the industry would be reluctant to foreground such work, ultimately informed the six-month sabbatical, says Gina. “The art world, at that time, didn't feel receptive to spirituality, to talk about plants would have landed in a quite leftfield way. So that was an imperative to take myself out of that context,” she shares. “The most rewarding part [of The Botanical Mind] was to feel that actually, there's a big appetite for thinking and talking about the role of spirituality in art. I was shocked actually, by the enthusiasm: there is a turn to non-western ways of appreciating life and the world [currently], a prevailing interest not only of mine, but in the wider art world.” Here she cites a recent trip to the Venice Biennale, where she observed pieces that echoed the tenor of The Botanical Mind – as well as shows by several artists whose work she featured.
While Gina is ambivalent of this current moment’s staying power, her own trajectory is firmly rooted in an intimacy with natural forces and the scope of possibility. “Curating came from a wonderment with the world, a way of inquiring into the nature of being, but I could have gone into either science or art, drawn to both realms because of this appetite to explore the natural world,” she says. “Over time, my interests have really honed in on the sense in which art and spirituality are both ways of giving expression to invisible realms and sharing those. So it’s an ongoing interest, and in terms of my research, I’m focusing more now on light, vision, pattern and the eye – how one can cultivate an inner vision or spiritual sight.”
Gina wears the TOAST Indigo Twill Culotte Jumpsuit.
Words by Zoe Whitfield.
Photography by Lesley Lau.
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