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- 10 - 19
‘I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world, one could not even blame nature for them.’ – The Day of the Triffids (1951) John Wyndham
Delivered with Chelsea Physic Garden as part of their 350th anniversary, Annie Trevorah’s solo exhibition Triffids draws on the ecological dimensions of science fiction to imagine a speculative future where the colonising species is not human but plant.
Taking inspiration from John Wyndham’s ecocatastrophe narrative The Day of the Triffids, in which an ambulatory, carnivorous and vengeful plant species breaks free from the experimental greenhouses in which they were cultivated to run amok across the English countryside, Trevorah reconfigures a mixture of textures and forms found in Chelsea Physic Garden’s own greenhouses to imagine this species in its destructive hybridisation and the ways in which it may flourish in a future hostile to human survival.
Spanning Pump House Galleries four floors and featuring a combination of hanging, floor and wall-based sculptures, Triffids treats us to flora with unique sensory structures that breathe, eat, digest and move about, whilst sharing many of the same interactive systems as humans. Numbering among such chimeras, are plants equipped with armour, thorns, spines and noxious defences that threaten the hubris of human exceptionalism in which we are predators but never prey.
In privileging the nonhuman, Triffids prompts us to reconsider the human subject as just one of many organisms within a dynamic ecology of being, each with their own intrinsic vitalisms and potentialities, invariably involved in practices of their own becoming.
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18th: PV 6–9 PM, with a Performance by Mai Nygeng Tri (7pm)
19th: Open 12–7pm
20th: Open 12–7pm
21st: Open 10am–7pm
22nd: Open 10am–7pm
22nd: Closing Event 4–7 PM, with an Artist talk with Tabish Khan (5pm) and a Performance by Harriet Poznansky (6pm)
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Annie Trevorah is a British artist living in London. She completed her MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Trevorah's first solo show, Symbiosis, took place in Feb 2023, London. She has exhibited internationally with recent shows at Centro Culturale di Milano, Las Laquna Gallery, USA, 67 York Street and Fold, London. She received the Gold Award by Gallery Nat for her work in Rush to the Wilderness and exhibited in the Chaiya Awards show and the Aesthetica Art Prize show (2023). In 2022, Trevorah was commissioned by Wandsworth Council to produce a public sculpture in Battersea Park, replacing Barbara Hepworth's Single Form whilst on loan. She was also awarded the Chianciano Biennale 2022 Prize for Photography and Digital Art; is a recipient of ICAC Art Critics Award, and is a Visual Art Open UK & International Emerging Artists 2023 finalist.
Francesca Dobbe is a curator, writer and artist living and working in London. She holds a MA in Sculpture from the RCA and a BA in Fine Art from UAL. Recent curatorial projects include: Red in Tooth and Claw, a group exhibition of 10 queer and female-identifying artists that considered monstrosity as a political nexus (Filet, London, 2023); Stack, an exhibition of 7 artists which looked at media-induced temporalities as a means to mediate our culture of speed (67 York Street, London, 2022); and Aktion Raumtausch, a programme of live art and performances that explored soup as a metaphor for collaboration: the notion that each constituent ingredients has meaning only insofar as it combines with the others (NKR, Dusseldorf, 2022). Her artwork has recently been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at Black Box, Farnham; South London Gallery, London; Humber Street Gallery, Hull; and Mirabel Studios, Manchester.
Pump House Gallery
Battersea Park
London SW11 4NJ
(Rosary Gate Car Park)
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