My work addresses concerns about the relationship between humans and landscape and how we define ‘nature’. My paintings focus on the physical structures and cultural origins of gardens, and the plants that are given permission to grow there. Plant Blindness is a term for the human inability to notice plants in one's everyday life. In our daily interactions with (or ignorance of) nature we don't see the whole cycle and selectively ignore plants. Certain plants are only identifiable to the typical observer when they are in their most iconic blooming phases, not as unshowy seedheads or tender sprouts. In the Poppy Pod Facsimile sculptures, I am attempting to recapture a moment of awakening and reconnection to these plants. Always imperfect, never quite as remembered, they are infused with futility and hope and act as a possible guide for a future where we may only recall the flora diminished by shifting climate. I look for the moments when familiar plants can appear alien, like quavering poppy pods, or surprising, as with the dark seed-filled remains of last summer’s daisies. Understanding that a garden is built through control and exclusion, I examine the ways in which nature refuses to comply.

Claire Elliott is a painter who lives and works in Portland, OR. She received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2014 and is a member of Wave Contemporary and Well Well Projects.