Plants and Soil

Simon Hempel

Weight 500 g
Dimensions 274 × 180 mm
printrun

print-run 400 copies

Cover

screenprinted and clothbound hardcover

binding

thread bound

printing

offset printed

Format

274 x 180 mm

coverage

68 pages comprising of 8 gatefolds

ISBN

ISBN 978-90-72076-38-0

Publisher

published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht

year

2009

25,00 

VAT exempted according to UStG §19
Delivery Time: ca. 10 workdays

Weight: 500g

In stock

The book Plants and Soil – The Visual Development of a Structure contains a photographic sequence comprising forty images. Identified here as the pivotal element of a certain spacial configuration in an urban setting in the city of Hamburg, the photographs portray a topiary-like garden sculpture in the shape of a peacock.

The operation the goddesses Juno and Iris perform is a transformation (an abstraction) – from the globe of the eye (from bulbus oculi) to a pattern of plumage, from the organ of sight to an ornament (to illustration). A symbolic transplantation, taxidermy of a concept. By making the peacock the lasting bearer of the notion of Argos’ multi-ocular gaze, Juno maintains Argos’ legacy. It is without doubt the many-eyed Argos (the Panoptes – the All-Seeing) who, by his surveying gaze, is enabled to gain an exhaustive conception of an image of the world.

With reference to the latest theory of colour introduced by his contemporary Franciscus Aguilonius, Rubens based his allegory of seeing – and notably Iris’ accompanying rainbow – on a blue-red-yellow colour scheme. Aguilonius – otherwise known as Francois d’Aguilon – was a Brussels-born jesuit mathematician, a physicist and architect, the author of a six-volume treatise on optics and active in Antwerp at the same time as Rubens. Rubens contributed the frontispieces and several illustrations to his ‘Six Books of Optics’. In his comprehensive study Aguilonius explicates, inter alia, the principles of stereographic projection. Stereographic projection is a geometric function that projects a sphere onto a plane. It is used to make a coherent two-dimensional illustration from the three-dimensional thing – such as a map from the terrestrial globe. — SH