Diana Scherer is an Amsterdam-based visual artist who decided to recruit Mother Nature to help her with her latest art project Exercises in Root System Domestication. By combining design, art, craft and science in this project, Scherer manages to manipulate plant roots to grow in a particular way and create complex and mesmerizing patterns.
In order to achieve this effect, Scherer collaborates with biologists, engineers and designers and creates geometric templates which are placed below ground and serve as a “pathway” for the plants’ subterranean systems.
Besides wanting to make impressive artworks with this project, the artist also wants to learn more about the behavior of the plants.
“Darwin discovered that plants are a lot more intelligent than everybody thought,” – Scherer shares on her website. “For contemporary botanists, this buried matter is still a wondrous land. There is a global investigation to discover this hidden world. I also want to explore it and apply the ‘intelligence’ of plants in my work.”
Check out some of her intriguing works below.
