"The Fantastic Bestiary - Botanical Hybridizations" is my main personal project, the one that fully reflect my artistic vision. 

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In simple words, it's a research about plants and the shapes they hide:

Observing many plants in real life, from different perspectives, in their entirety or focusing on a detail, I realized that I often end up finding something familiar. 

It's the concept of pareidolia, and nature offer so many shapes to work on.

Discovering these shapes amazed me, so I started looking for this familiarities in my daily life, and I found endless inspiration to create my collection of botanical creatures.

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The first publication consist of 14 creatures, and the plants that inspired them. 

They're all carefully hand drawn on a coffee-dyed paper, with marker, acrylics, pastels, and ink. 

I chose to present them on this kind of paper, and to give them the aesthetic of ancient books of scientific illustration, to recall herbariums: the first publications that presented surreal plants.

Why? Because, being copied from previous publications, or made of information brought by travellers or translators, it wasn't uncommon for the plants described to be incorrect, sometimes for some details, sometimes completely. 

So, fascinated and inspired by getting to know this, and by all the fantastic and surreal plants we can find in history and folklore from the dawn of civilization to the present day, from mythology to fantasy, I decided to create my own Fantastic Bestiary.

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Sharing this project I'd like to invite people to slow down, observe the nature and search for these magical details, hidden around us in our daily life. I love the idea that, with just a bit of imagination, we are potentially surrounded by magic, and that noticing it can brighten our day. 

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with love, Emma