GAIA Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities


CURATING GAIA: INTERSECTIONS OF NATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND FORM


Ciara Struwig
Special Collections Librarian at the JGCBA, Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand

Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
- Leonardo da Vinci

In an era marked by ecological reckoning and renewed wonder at the natural world, Gaia: Dialogues between the book arts, natural sciences & plant humanities invites us to rediscover our relationship with the Earth through the intimate, tactile form of the book. Da Vinci's notion of the 'artist as naturalist' is not merely a comparison; it represents a recurring archetype. The curiosity to see, collect, and interpret is central to both the artistic and naturalist mindset.

Our relationship with nature is complex, shaped by layers of memory, history, institutional frameworks, romantic ideals, as well as politics, economics, and power dynamics. This tangled history means that engagement with the natural world is never neutral: each of us plays a role - whether through reverence and love or through environmental threat and exploitation.

Bringing together a diverse group of contemporary book artists, this exhibition explores the mythic and material dimensions of Gaia—the primordial Earth goddess. Each artist's book is a self-contained world, fusing narrative, image, structure, and texture, reflecting not only nature's beauty and fragility but also the shifting human role within the biosphere. By turning these pages, viewers are encouraged to slow down, reflect, and reimagine their place in the ecological web.

This exhibition has been nurtured over time, beginning with the late Rosalind Cleaver, special collections librarian at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts (JGCBA). A few years ago, Ros began envisioning Gaia, thoughtfully selecting artists whose work in the collection explored the natural world. Throughout her life, she was deeply committed to caring for the earth, always striving to 'touch the earth lightly.' Like many of the artists featured here, Ros embodied a holistic curiosity, drawn to the mysteries and rhythms of nature. Building on her initial selections, we expanded the scope by adding more works from the collection, alongside items from the Life Sciences Museum and Ros's own archive of artworks.

The curatorial framework grew out of conversations with Professor Rafael de Almeida, whose ecological work helped refine our thinking around the biosphere and its nested systems. As our thinking evolved, we moved from the broad concept of the biosphere - to more specific and textured ecosystems: biomes as places where climate, soil, species, and relationships shape one another over time.

This logic offered a compelling model for the exhibition itself, where the idea of biomes serves as a conceptual metaphor—a way of thinking about how creative, scientific, and cultural practices intersect. Just as biomes are dynamic systems where plants, animals, and climates interact and adapt, the exhibition envisions biomes as metaphorical ecosystems where artists, materials, disciplines, and ideas meet in a delicate balance of influence and exchange.

Accordingly, Gaia is structured around four thematic zones or “curatorial biomes”: Fauna, Flora, Landscape and Minerals, and the Anthropocene. Each zone draws on multiple knowledge systems. To complement the artists' books, the exhibition includes a number of specimens, posters, and rare scientific texts generously contributed by the Wits Life Sciences Museum and the C.E. Moss Herbarium. Several of Ros's own artworks complete the constellation, providing a poignant visual and emotional anchor to the conceptual terrain of the exhibition. Rather than dividing materials by medium, discipline, or chronology, they are interwoven, mirroring how natural biomes overlap and rely on inter-species relationships to sustain themselves.

The biome concept also shapes the exhibition's spatial and sensory experience. Each zone becomes a multispecies encounter—between insects and pages, specimens and printed forms, archival systems, and emotional resonance. Viewers are invited to move through the space as they would an ecosystem: observing patterns, tracing relationships, and sensing moments of fragility, adaptation, and change.

This framing opens a deeper question: what kinds of knowledge emerge when disciplinary boundaries dissolve? The artists engage with the natural world not only through observation and documentation but also through metaphor, narrative, and material inquiry. Their books echo herbarium sheets, scientific diagrams, field notes, and cabinets of curiosity, while also challenging traditional systems of classification and control.

In this sense, the exhibition does not treat the book arts, natural sciences, and plant humanities as separate realms but as interconnected systems, each helping us understand what it means to live in relation with the Earth. Whether evoking the rhythm of a butterfly's migration, the architecture of a plant cell, the geological layering of stone, or the haunting legacy of extinction, these works form part of a wider ecology of thought and feeling.

Our collaboration across disciplines in this exhibition is beautifully encapsulated by James Lovelock's observation that “Gaia Theory sees the biota and the rocks, the air, and the oceans as existing as a tightly coupled entity. Its evolution is a single process and not several separate processes studied in different buildings of universities.”1 In that spirit, Gaia brings together contributions from artists, scientists, and scholars whose work crosses traditional boundaries to reflect a more integrated understanding of life on Earth.

The exhibition draws primarily from the remarkable holdings of the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts (JGCBA). Jean Baudrillard introduced the idea that it is invariably 'oneself' that one collects, 2 suggesting that collecting is not simply the amassing of objects but the projection of selfhood—of curiosity, values, and memory—onto the world. This idea is keenly felt throughout Gaia, where the selection of books from the JGCBA reflects Jack's particular interest in not only the natural world but also the methods of observation, documentation, and preservation that resonate both in science and the book arts.

A particularly emblematic work from the collection is The WunderCabinet (2011) (pg.53) by Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen, a 21st-century interpretation of the historical cabinet of curiosities. This intricately crafted piece includes a miniature cabinet filled with over eighty carefully selected objects from the artists' own collections: fossilized shark teeth, optical lenses, seed pods, glass eyes, and more. At its core is a finely produced book, printed by hand, coloured, collaged, and bound with obsessive detail, divided into two traditional categories of wonder: Naturalia and Artificialia. This “movable museum,” as scholar Kristen Renzi3 describes it, collapses boundaries between book, box, and exhibition, mirroring Gaia's curatorial spirit as a space of wonder, reflection, and layered meaning.

The exhibition catalogue features essays by Professors Isabel Hofmeyr and Rafael de Almeida, whose interdisciplinary insights provide vital context on botanical knowledge and biomes as curatorial metaphors. Together, these contributions highlight the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration in shaping how we perceive, engage with, and care for the natural world. Whether through scientific specimens, poetic artworks, or critical essays, Gaia demonstrates how knowledge and creativity can converge to tell more nuanced, more connected stories of life on Earth.

An Ecology in Four Parts

As mentioned, Gaia unfolds across four interconnected realms: Fauna, Flora, Landscape and Minerals, and the Anthropocene, each offering a distinct lens on our relationship with the natural world. Through the selected works, viewers are invited into diverse conversations about species vulnerability, ecological time, embodied landscapes, and human responsibility. The artists' books drawn from the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts collection provide intimate, often tactile experiences of ecological connection, while natural science materials add historical and taxonomic depth. Selected artworks by Ros Cleaver complement these with a personal, passionate response to environmental fragility. Together, these groupings form a meditation on Gaia, not as myth, but as a model of living.

Fauna

In this body of work the exhibition centres animal life - both visible and elusive - and its intricate entanglement with human culture and planetary systems.

Judith Mason's A Book for Dada (1992) (pg.44) is a silent, profound homage. Composed without words, it traces bird footprints across the page, inviting a decelerated reading—a slowing down that echoes the exhibition's ethic of 'treading lightly.' Inspired by the San artist Coinx' ai Qgam (nicknamed Dada), who once remarked that “books mean nothing” to her, Mason's response is to create a book that listens rather than speaks. This quiet, nearly invisible language embodies a respectful engagement with land, lineage, and loss - placing human expression in service of ecological humility.

In its material and conceptual restraint, A Book for Dada becomes an invocation of Gaia's ethic: attunement, reverence, and interconnectedness.

Tatjana Bergelt's Pas de Deux (2022) (pg.56) operates as a layered duet between scientific inquiry and poetic imagination. This dual-volume artist's book juxtaposes the life and exile of Vladimir Nabokov (writer and lepidopterist) with the migratory patterns of the Neotropical Polyommatus blue butterflies he studied. Crafted from accordion-folded Japanese paper, the work echoes the delicacy of butterfly wings, while its visual structure recalls field guides and archives. Meticulously composed pages contain branching DNA genealogies, annotated field notes, microscope imagery, and maps of both butterfly evolution and human displacement. Bergelt's project straddles art, literature, and evolutionary biology, suggesting that classification, memory, and movement are shared impulses among all life forms. By aligning Nabokov's migrations with those of the butterflies, the work expands the category of 'fauna' to include exile, imagination, and ecological kinship.

Further anchoring this theme of observation and collection are displays of indigenous South African insect specimens and shells from the Wits Life Sciences Museum (pg.98). The presentation methods of archival drawers, hand-written labels, and repurposed containers like matchboxes or chocolate tins, resonate deeply with the book arts. Like a book, a specimen drawer invites intimate, sequential engagement. The layering of labels, corrections, and evolving taxonomies speaks to the palimpsest nature of knowledge - always in flux, always partial. These collected fragments reflect the same curiosity, care, and narrative impulse that artists' books evoke.

Flora

This section turns attention to plant life as a site of endurance, transformation, and system-wide interdependence. Botanical study is both a scientific practice and an act of wonder.

The Cycad Collection, Volume 1: Natal Province (1996) (pg.37), conceived as the result of five years of painstaking work by the South African Botanical Diversity Network and collaborators, stands as a rare tribute to this living fossil, an ancient lineage predating the dinosaurs. Each hand-coloured lithograph offers a richly textured portrait of a single cycad species, embodying the slow rhythms of plant growth and artistic labour. The work captures both the particularities of the species and their broader significance as symbols of survival and vulnerability. In this way, it reclaims the tradition of botanical illustration not only as documentation but as a practice of reverence.

Additional contributions include rare herbarium sheets from the C.E. Moss Herbarium and plant specimens from the Life Sciences Museum (pg.90). These archival materials underscore the long tradition of collecting, naming, and classifying plants, while also reminding us of the fragility and impermanence of botanical knowledge in the face of climate change and habitat loss.

Landscape and Minerals

In this section of landscapes and their minerals, terrain becomes both a physical reality and a metaphor for time, memory, and origin.

stonewater (2013) (pg.78), a collaborative book by Richard Penn and Guinevere Glasfurd, emerges from their shared fascination with geology and memory. During a 24-day residency at Nirox in 2013, they exchanged journals daily, responding to each other's texts and images. The resulting double-book melds poetic reflections, drawings of stone and water, and fragments of geological history. This work blurs boundaries between text and image, past and present, surface and depth - reminding us that landscapes hold stories that endure beyond human lifespans.

Richard Long's Mud Hand Print Book (1984) (pg.68) offers a direct, physical encounter with landscape. Using only his hand and mud, Long marks each page with a print -turning the book into a ritual of touch and gesture. Long's land art is known for walking-based interventions, but here, the act is more intimate: the mud is not walked through but held, pressed, transferred. The result is a tactile archive of presence, a record of bodily engagement with the earth. This work resonates especially with the Anthropocene as a theme, suggesting that even the smallest of gestures carries the weight of ecological significance.

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene zone confronts the destructive power of human activity and the urgent need to rethink our role in Earth's future.

On Kawara's One Million Years (1969) (pg.72) compresses the enormity of time into a conceptual bookwork, listing one million years backward and forward. Its minimal form belies the vastness of time it evokes—a stark reminder of humanity's fleeting presence in geological history. Kawara's work reframes time as a layered continuum, challenging linear narratives and foregrounding human mortality alongside planetary endurance.

Rosalind Cleaver's Dungbeetle (2008) (pg.74) explores the intertwined violence of colonial trade and ecological destruction. Formed in the shape of a scarab—an ancient symbol of regeneration—the book presents four objects derived from elephant ivory: a billiard ball, cosmetic mirror, ivory-black paint, and piano keys. Each unfolds as a book-within-a-book, offering insight into how the ivory trade fuelled European material culture while decimating elephant populations. The dung beetle, which survives on elephant dung, becomes a symbol of interdependence—both biological and metaphorical. The work implicates systems of vanity, industry, and imperialism in a single extended meditation on extinction and survival.

Together, these works, and the surrounding archival and scientific materials articulate the urgency and complexity of the Anthropocene moment. The exhibition's final biome offers a space for contemplation, mourning, and envisioning regenerative futures.

Gaia emerges in a moment of urgent environmental change. Climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion are no longer distant futures—they are our present. In response, this exhibition offers a space not only for documentation but also for imagination, memory, and care. Artist's books are uniquely suited to hold this complexity. They question assumptions, trace overlooked stories and propose new ways of seeing and being.

At its heart, Gaia affirms the vital role of collaboration across the arts, life sciences, and humanities, not only to understand ecological systems but to imagine sustainable futures. These dialogues do more than enrich knowledge; they transform our relationship with the world, reminding us that knowledge is co-created across disciplines, cultures, and species.

Gaia invites viewers to look more closely at the world around them and to ask: How do we live - ethically, curiously, respectfully - within the more-than-human world? It is our hope that the exhibition leaves its audience inspired to follow Ros's example to touch the Earth lightly, with care, respect, and a renewed sense of belonging.

  1. James Lovelock. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 488.
  2. Jean Baudrillard. 1996. The System of Objects. London, New York: Verso, 92.
  3. Kristen Renzi. 2017. “'In the Soul of the Sidereal World' Mining Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen's The WunderCabinet for a Critical Model of Interdisciplinary Curiosity”, in Quynn, Kristina & Silbergleid, Robin (eds.) (2017) Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations. Cham: Springer, 137.

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