Magnolia
Drawing on eighteenth-century traditions of floral decoration, découpage, and the drawing room as a site of domestic display, Magnolia reimagines these historical forms as a botanical counter-archive. Plants are removed from their ecological contexts and presented alongside aspirational paint names and branded colour palettes, exposing the processes through which nature is renamed, aestheticised, and transformed into a consumer product.
The work emerged from research into the historical classification of colour, including Abraham Gottlob Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (1774) and its later adaptation by Patrick Syme. It traces a lineage from scientific attempts to standardise colour through natural history to contemporary marketing practices that continue to draw authority from the language of nature. This connection became explicit in Farrow & Ball's 2019 collaboration with the Natural History Museum, Colour by Nature, which reissued Werner's taxonomy as a commercial paint range.
By bringing together botanical imagery, decorative traditions, and contemporary branding, Magnolia explores how systems of classification outlive their original contexts. The work asks what is lost when living plants become ornamental motifs, when scientific description becomes lifestyle marketing, and when taxonomy becomes taste.
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