Michael McHugh’s exhibition has been some years in the making, and in the spirit of some of the world’s best known, botanists, scientists, artists and researchers, McHugh curates and assembles a range of plantopia from the Pacific Islands, an area he has been traveling too since a child. Since the easement of recent travel restrictions, Michael McHugh has made a concerted efforts to escape to the Pacific Islands, in search of a new plant order; loosing himself among a range of islands and archipelagos. Some trips were well planned while others where more in the vein of ‘let’s just see what happens.’
A seminal trip in this recent project with his son Henry saw McHugh visiting the islands of Tahiti, Samoa and Fiji, researching, drawing and photographing local flora, which in many ways was the catalyst to realising there was much to explore around the islands. The resulting paintings uses these thoughts and images to create highly personal organic universes, full of vivid colour and form. Often the final images are shaped as much by the artist’s personal history and memories of his first views of certain plants as they are by studious botanical drawings.
In addition to his field research, visits to visited the New York Botanical Garden and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library (one of the largest botanical research libraries in the world)—has also seen McHugh use historical research material, returning several extinct species to life, and placed them alongside living species and totally imagined ones. This has allowed him to place together species which have never coexisted—bringing about new ecosystems. The artist has produced a potential universe rather than directly reflecting our own flora, allowing his imagination has free rein the carefully reached forms of his botanical drawings. He offers a new world where structures flow and grow through the paintings, creating vibrant textures and patterns which overwhelm the scenes.
In these works, the kaleidoscopic interplay of colour and composition has a major role. We bathe in the rich vividness of Happy Hour and bask in the searing Honeycomb, or are simply captured by the verdant and sinuous forms of the wall-length Reunion—which becomes a riotous commingling of texture, hue and anthrophonic forms.
Through McHugh’s new biomes, we see the manifestation of a world that could have been or could still be, a reflection of the artist’s environmental passion. He asks us all to join in this celebration and protection of the natural world in all its joyful wonder.
McHugh’s new biome paintings create highly personal organic worlds—full of vivid colour and form—but authentic to time and place and reflection of the artist’s environmental passion. He asks us all to join in this celebration and protection of the natural world in all its splendour.
