Tracey Bush

As part of a month-long residency, artist Tracey Bush will be exploring large scale botanical artworks in the Artist Studio.

Tracey will be working on huge sheets of handmade papers made from offcuts of cotton rag used in the garment industry. Using spray paints, which reference the liminal, uneasy spaces where the plants have been collected, Tracey subverts the machismo legacy of spray painting by utilising pressed flowers as stencils.

Referring to her own pressed plants to make hand-drawn plant silhouettes, Tracey collages fragments of found materials, branded paper packaging for her Art: the detritus of consumerism.

No hierarchy was applied to to the wild plants pictured; adventive, ruderal species were all depicted with equal weight. Her intention is to revitalise degraded landscapes as a pseudo-form of gardening.

About the Artist

Tracey Bush is a British artist who works with paper. Throughout her career as an artist, she has focused on the environment. Her most expansive work is the ‘Nine Wild Plants Project’, begun in 2004, which is an investigation of ‘seeing’ wild plants in an era of climate change, and extractivist/consumerist economies. A new set of drawings with branded paper packaging collage is featured in the curated exhibition Flowers Forever in the München Kunsthalle der HypoKulturstiftung (with catalogue).The exhibition tours to Hamburg and Rome.

Find out more about Tracey on her website here / Follow Tracey on Instagram here