House & Garden magasine asked me to contribute a piece for the Millenium Seed Bank auction so i put in a big red poppy and it sold at Sotherby's. I met Peter Crane, the Director of Kew, at the auction and he talked to me about the night-flowering species they have there and about the scent at night, and I started having dreams about the place. I told Tanya Compton at house & Garden that I'd love to have a residency at Kew and she helped to set it up. |
I didn't have any money at the beginning but then the Leverhulme Trust financed it. It pulled my work in a most bizarre way, it was an Alice in Wonderland time. I was working in the Marianne North Building, which I think was haunted, and I was painting in the Temperate House at night with crows walking on the ceiling. I'd be alone in this glass structure and suddenly there'd be this little wind and all the trees would rustle. |
I'd think, 'God, here he comes, it's old Vincent from 1830 tweaking his plants.' It is the most extraordinary place on earth and it was hard not to be sucked inside out as an artist. There's stuff there you cannot paint. It's had its effect on me.
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| Jo Self - first Artist in Residence at Kew Gardens
Before she took up the residency Jo's main source of inspiration was her own 150 foot garden in Brixton which she made over 15 years.
At first she found Kew's huge supply of subject matter bewildering. Where to start? As she said recently to Elspeth Thompson: 'It was one extreme to another - all of a sudden I was faced with wonderful orchids and all sorts of strange exotic plants that I'd never even heard of before.'
Her paintings are very different from the botanically perfect textbook watercolours and drawings normally associated with the Gardens. Neither botanist, scientist nor gardener, she often feels vulnerable when working at Kew, describing herself as 'this mad artist, coming and going at strange hours and answering to no one'.
Jo Self is a painter of flowers but her fascination for them has nothing to do with science or botany. She uses their fantastically strange forms and unimaginably vivid colours to reflect her own emotions. The images she creates are bold and modern.
Kew has had a deep and powerful effect on Jo Self. She has visited the gardens to paint at different times of the day and night. 'There's a very intense energy in the hothouse, and the scent of all the plants is almost overpowering', she says. 'I was practically hallucinating, having all sorts of peculiar dreams.' She goes on to say: 'My work was rather abstract and ethereal before, but it has become very fecund, with a sort of meatier edge to it.'
In her new industrial space in South London Jo has created her very own hothouse, a 'mini-Kew', in which she intends to grow palm trees, flowering climbers and waterlilies in oil drums and keep tropical butterflies. |
