Lecture Theatre, Dept. of Botany, Trinity College

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to announce an upcoming talk presented in collaboration with the Department of Botany, Trinity College Dublin. In the context of Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition variations on a garden, Professor Trevor Hodkinson will discuss ‘Botanical Collecting in the Cradle of Agriculture and Beyond’.

An Associate Professor in the Department of Botany, Hodkinson specialises in plant systematics and the evolutionary history of plants. His talk will be followed by a guided tour of the School’s Herbarium. A reference collection of plants of significant Irish and international relevance, it was established in 1840 and the existing building has been in use since 1910.

A key work in the current exhibition is Abbas Akhavan’s study for a monument (2013-16). This large scale sculptural installation presents a series of bronze plants laid out on white cotton bed sheets across the Gallery floor. These are the forms of native and endemic species from the area in and around the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in present-day Iraq. Working with images from the ‘The Flora of Iraq’ archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, Akhavan has enlarged the plant species to monument scale.