JOYCE CAMPBELL

LA Botanical is a series of ambrotype portraits of plant species introduced to California – which now grow wild and alienated from their original purposes. Her choice to use the wet plate ambrotype process is informed by an eco-logic. The ambrotype was invented the same year that Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. The exhibition comprises six new large-scale handprinted photographic enlargements from ambrotype negatives, and a selection of the original ambrotype contact prints from 2005. They are dramatic, beautiful and ghostly all at once.

Campbell’s publication has a renewed relevance. Tessa Laird, in her essay calls this book “a poisoner’s handbook, a herbalist’s cure-all, a shaman’s bundle, a gardener’s guide, a botanist’s field manual, an artist’s scrapbook” It can be all these things. It is multidisciplinary in its scope, but it exists primarily as an art work.