Tillandsia Studies (2016)


A body of work that is inspired by the Spanish neuroscientist’s Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s early drawings and speculations of neurons and networks in the human brain.

The photographs are all of air plants (tillandsias) which are native to Guatemala and whose morphology often closely resembles the geometry of neural structures.

Over the years, I have become fascinated with the idea that plants, not having centralized brains or nervous systems; can be understood in themselves as a physical embodiment of brains and intelligence.

Considering this, in this particular set of photographic studies, I try to explore what types of geometries could be furthered distilled from the morphology of some of these plant specimens. Initially photographs of tillandsias are inserted as 2D planes into 3D software, and the curves in the images are used to create new geometrical bodies — architectures that are built directly onto the photograph and then rendered to create the final image.