Trained in sculpture and illustration in Brussels, the Belgian artist Sandrine de Borman seeks to break down the barriers of knowledge and to open our eyes.
She has developed exhibitions which bring together artistic and scientific perspectives, activist and poetic, and her subjects are universally present: seashells, plastic bags, seeds. She has been passionate about botany for over ten years and explores the place of plants in a human way of life which is increasingly disconnected from the natural world. She preserves the traces of plant life, especially in wild and threatened places, and examines our ambivalent relationship with the plant world that surrounds us. To this end she has developed two original techniques, tataki-zomé and phytopression, in which plants leave their organic imprint on textile or paper using only their sap as inks.
The project À hauteur d’herbe, which Sandrine de Borman developed during her residencies at the Château de l’Esparou in 2019 and at the Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans in 2020, was born out of the words of poet Denise Le Dantec: ‘It is through seeing in every plant an irreplaceable and life-giving individual that man can come to understand himself and his own life’. She allows herself to be guided in her geo-poetic journey by the plants themselves, including plants which are often seen as ‘insignificant’ or even ‘bad’, and her observation of the smallest details opens up whole new worlds. She creates her artworks through phytopression, which makes visible the biological architecture of a plant. She has created a sensitive and poetic pressed plant herbarium, and in opening our eyes to the precious life around us, she campaigns for the world of plants to have a greater presence in our lives.