Tully Arnot’s practice explores models of plant-based multisensory perception as well as how technology mediates our relationships with the natural world, through areas including plant robotics and the simulation of nature. These artworks reflect on Arnot’s earlier research, looking at how emergent ways of being are facilitated by social media and human-robot interactions, including with AI, companionship robots and consumer level replacements of human pleasure, connection and labour.

The exhibition Soft reflects on ways in which we interact with the reproductive cycles of plants - nurturing, caring, softening. The work developed in response to scientific descriptions of parental plant care, of how seed embryos have little packed lunches of nutrients to help them on their way, till they find sustenance from light and soil. This metaphor slips, wanders off in contemplation of beginnings, endings, cycles and embodied knowledge. Dancing flowers, the desires of bees, disgorged fruit, a plant's touch as an extension of self…

image: Tully Arnot, Untitled studio experiment, 2018, macro photograph, image courtesy and © the artist