“Mr. Vogel asked me to relax and project myself into the philodendron. Several things took place as I began to carry out his request. First, I wondered exactly how I could get inside a plant. I made a conscious decision to let my imagination take over and found myself entering the main stem through a doorway at its base. Once inside, I saw the moving cells and water traveling upward through the stem, and let myself move with this upward flow. Approaching the spreading leaves in my imagination, I could feel myself being drawn from an imaginary world into a realm over which I had no control. There were no mental pictures, but rather a feeling that i was becoming part of, and filling out, a broad expansive surface. This seemed to me to be describable only as pure consciousness. I felt acceptance and positive protection by the plant. There was no sense of time, just a feeling of unity in existence and in space. I smiled spontaneously and let myself be one with the plant”
Excerpt from The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, 1973
BIO / text by Šárka Koudelová: Nela Britaňáková (1995) graduated from the Ceramics studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and now continues her studies at the Sculpture studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In her work, she naturally utilizes the contemporary language of fluid object installation. To transfer the intended message and emotions, she uses contextual meanings of materials, post-scenic configuration of “trashy” or, on the contrary, crafted objects, group performances (or their recordings) and a generationally-symptomatic bridge between pseudo-mythological vizual leftovers of the consumerist age and their retrograde casting into natural environment in agony.
CREDITS
Artwork / Nela Britaňáková
Camera / Anežka Horová
Sound / Julie Lupačová
BIO text / Šárka Koudelová
