Flora: Photographs by Jessica Tampas
Artist Statement
I see photography as a way to document beauty where I find it in the world. Several years ago, I discovered a place of astonishing and unexpected beauty: a half-forgotten greenhouse in rural Michigan. Set back behind other greenhouses full of neat rows of docile flowers, this building is where damaged or unneeded plants are stored. Left in a state of benign neglect, wildness begins to show through the greenhouse’s ordered and deliberate human vision of nature.
In this exhibition, I have tried to capture the beautiful quiet chaos that results: polite domestic plants like petunias escape and grow roguishly on the floor or wherever else they can take root; wild plants and flowers outside the greenhouse draw close and press in against the transparent walls.
I have returned again and again to this place where ill flowers are kept — stepping into the heat and moisture and life in the greenhouse is like
being taken away to another world.
About Jessica
Jessica Tampas holds a BA in Art History and Photography from Simmons College and an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of
Art. She has taught photography for Emerson College in the Netherlands and worked for eight years under the guidance of Stuart Rogers Photography in Chicago before starting Jessica Tampas Photography, Ltd., in 1995. In 2010 she received a prestigious Fellowship and
Residency with the Ragdale Foundation.
I see photography as a way to document beauty where I find it in the world. Several years ago, I discovered a place of astonishing and unexpected beauty: a half-forgotten greenhouse in rural Michigan. Set back behind other greenhouses full of neat rows of docile flowers, this building is where damaged or unneeded plants are stored. Left in a state of benign neglect, wildness begins to show through the greenhouse’s ordered and deliberate human vision of nature.
In this exhibition, I have tried to capture the beautiful quiet chaos that results: polite domestic plants like petunias escape and grow roguishly on the floor or wherever else they can take root; wild plants and flowers outside the greenhouse draw close and press in against the transparent walls.
I have returned again and again to this place where ill flowers are kept — stepping into the heat and moisture and life in the greenhouse is like
being taken away to another world.
About Jessica
Jessica Tampas holds a BA in Art History and Photography from Simmons College and an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of
Art. She has taught photography for Emerson College in the Netherlands and worked for eight years under the guidance of Stuart Rogers Photography in Chicago before starting Jessica Tampas Photography, Ltd., in 1995. In 2010 she received a prestigious Fellowship and
Residency with the Ragdale Foundation.
