Belladonna and Eye (detail), 2014, chromatograms using filter paper, silver nitrate, sodium hydroxide, Atropa belladonna, and sunlight, each 80 by 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Wietske Maas is a researcher, artist, and curator who explores the messy codependencies between people, institutions, other life forms, and non-organic matter. In 2014 she began experimenting with a laboratory technique known as chromatography, which isolates or purifies elements of a substance by separating them according to their color. Scientists first applied chromatography to study plants and vegetal matter or to visualize soil health. Maas began to use the technique on a species of rogue urban plants: Atropa belladonna or “deadly nightshade,” (belladonna means “beautiful woman” in Italian) known for its psychotropic and poisonous properties, but also for cosmetic applications. It is said that the Roman emperor Augustus was murdered by his wife using Atropa belladonna, and that the Egyptian queen Cleopatra used the plant’s extract to dilate the pupils of her eyes for a more seductive appearance. It is in the relationship of this plant to seeing that Maas extends an inquiry into the metabolic nature of vision, specifically in relation to the Sun—our planetary overlord of light and visibility, but also source of our photosynthetic nutrition and life. If images are considered to be information fed into our cognition, Maas reminds us that they are also a material recording of light, and furthermore that our eyes share many photosensitivities with plants.
Prepared with silver nitrate—a crucial chemical for the development of photography—the chromatograms are created by soaking a mixture of belladonna plant extract and sodium hydroxide into paper through a wick that has been inserted in a hole in the middle of the sheet. The final image is developed through exposure to sunlight, resulting in what Maas calls “an embodied photograph of the plant.” Strangely, but perhaps not coincidentally, these self-growing images–the result of acts of photogenesis–assume the appearance of a large seductive eye looking back at you, perhaps from the world of plants, or from the ancient origins of solar images and the imagination of matter.
