"where time moves in spirals (portrait of a plant)" is an ongoing project about botanical gardens. The first part of it has been shown at Frappant Gallery Hamburg as part of the group expo "when air becomes dust".

In the works on display, plants come together that would hardly share a space in nature. Leaves, flowers and branches are fragmentarily detached from their original contexts, digitally collaged and layered on top of each other. The result is dense, hybrid pictorial spaces in which species and landscapes interpenetrate - a nature that only exists in the picture. Printing on passe-partout creates a third dimension.

A central point of reference is the botanical garden: a place where the cultivated meets the wild, where plants from all over the world coexist in carefully composed contexts. It is a living collection, research centre and exhibition space all in one - a place where plants are preserved that are threatened with extinction elsewhere.

Plants are given names here - small signs that identify and classify them and seem to give them meaning.

The works reflect this ambivalence. They are an approach to the relationship between man and nature, to our need to organise, name and preserve nature - and also to the deeply human longing for a ‘paradise on earth’. An idealised, attainable nature that promises beauty, harmony and comfort. But this paradise is not a given place - it is a projection, a construct that arises from the tension between longing and control.