Waddington Custot is delighted to present Marc Quinn’s solo exhibition, Photosynthetic Forms. The exhibition serves as an exploration of humanity’s complex relationship with nature and our environment, which we remain fundamentally a part of. Playing with scale and materiality, Quinn is able to draw out the balance that exists between us and nature, revealing how almost everything in the world today has been manipulated and influenced by human desire.

Our relationship to nature is often one of control, from gardening to agriculture, we tame nature to serve our wants and needs. The bonsai tree, in the form most know it, is a tree restricted to a miniaturised scale through human intervention. Normally, the size and shape of a tree is formed by its natural surroundings - its exposure to light, shade and nutrients. A bonsai is instead shaped by humans, for the pleasure of its baroque meanderings. Quinn’s Held by Desire (Cloud Garden) is a bronze portrait of a bonsai tree, which is in fact a sculpture of a sculpture, seemingly natural but created by human intention.

Works such as Light into Life (The Morphology of Forms), Light into Life (The Release of Oxygen) depict enlarged orchid varieties created in reflective stainless steel, alongside the palm-leaf Singularity (Sabal). These works reflect both the viewer and their surroundings, becoming analogue screens, activated by their audience. These screens are unlike those we use in our phones, that take us away from ourselves. Instead, these sculptures embody us in our environment and encourage us to be here, now.