Houseplant, 2018
Installation of photographic triptych and 14 miniature jesmonite houses
all images taken by the artist
Houseplant is an installation consisting of a photographic triptych and jesmonite miniature objects. The photographs from left to right depict a single houseplant progressively engulfed by incremental amounts of identical white miniature houses. The houses of chalky white colour are casted with jesmonite from the same original mould. They cling on to each chlorophyllic leaf as though a disease and mimic the multiplicative properties of a rampant bacterial colony. In the final image, the green is taken over by a tumbling arrangement of white.
Nature assumes the role of decoration in the urban man’s anthropocentric habitat; such as a building developments instantly planted trees, the ever-blooming table centrepiece, the modest houseplant pruned, potted and placed. These organic, growing, breathing objects inject themselves into our man-made spaces like acupuncture points that elevate our spatial experience. Houseplant is a play on the relationship of the man made habitat and the seemingly subservient role of nature. The precision of rigidly cut buildings and architecture against the lush and sprawling qualities of the organic is a juxtaposition I am interested in exploring.
My practice surrounds a continuous inquiry into the relationship between man and his
surroundings. Interior spaces and the poetic qualities of the home are concepts that I am
deeply invested in through working materially. The house casted in the work is modelled
after the house that I currently live in. Obsessively and repetitively casting identical copies of the building I call home was a process that produced an uncanny feeling of sentimentality. The image of the house enforcing its power in terms of quantity instead of scale imagines a peculiar wrestle between man and nature.
e mae lee 
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