Alice Channer: Megaflora

For over fifteen years, British artist Alice Channer has been creating sculptures representing nature in various states of transformation. The book accompanies her exhibition at the Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia, where her sculpture Megaflora (2021) is presented in the building's garden: a sand-cast aluminum bramble stem that has been extracted via three-dimensional scan and stretched vertically into a three-meter-high freestanding sculptural form. By way of scale or material, the form, nature, or appearance of the flora and fauna that makes up our natural world is transmogrified by Channer in a surprising, and often magical, manner. In this sense, her work speaks directly to the museum's rich, varied, and fragile zoological, paleontological, and botanical collections. At the same time, her work comments on how our environment has transformed by human activity. This is the first time the sculpture has been presented in an outdoor setting, powerfully showcasing the evocative strength and captivating ambiguity inherent in Channer's work. Her art consistently operates at the boundary between the real and the artificial, between nature and its reconstruction using industrial materials, technology, or precious metals.