GRAND HERBIER D’OMBRES

Since the 1950s, Lourdes Castro has dedicated herself to the creation of artist’s books, objects, drawings, prints, videos and performances based on her contact with elements from her daily life, especially landscapes and plants grown at her home-studio in Madeira, Portugal. Alongside this, her interest in methods of dematerialization of the art object led to her research on shadows, a central theme in her production. The book Grand herbier d’ombres [Large herbarium of shadows] refers to Lourdes Castro’s seminal work dated 1972. A collection of silhouettes of about 100 botanical species directly captured in the sun on heliographic paper. Herbariums are considered to be of enormous scientific value, not only for the study of taxonomy but also as depositaries of botanical specimens collected in the course of research intended for the documentation, classification and preservation of the floral diversity of a specific region, or country. What Lourdes Castro here created, essentially poetic, symbolic and even spiritual in nature, was an authentic visual encyclopedia in the form of a book-catalogue, with labels written by hand identifying a vast collection of botanical species from the artist’s island birthplace – “The Floating Garden in the Atlantic” – as an affective record alluding to the ephemeral, fleeting nature of time and the brevity of life.