The marble sculpture shown above is titled Eve, created by Scipione Tadolini in the 1870’s, and displayed beneath the glass roof of the Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Like all good Victorian nudes, this woman’s nether regions are discreetly hidden by greenery. Had Tadolini created this sculpture in the age of Instagram, he would have blotted out her nipples, too. Ah, we live in such times!
There is something sad today in art that aspires to realistic representation. In the case of Eve, that realism is not evident in her pose, but in her anatomy. I feel the same sadness in my photography when I try, sometimes obsessively, to capture the world as it is. This desperate documentation. I feel it, too, in the glass dome of the botanical gardens whose purpose is to cultivate interesting, rare, even endangered plant species. Botanists document plant life. Expand its taxonomy. Rush to produce a complete catalogue before it’s all gone.
I imagine an alien ship touching down on the grounds of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens in a post-human world. Maybe the lawn is scorched. They step inside the Kibble Palace, panes of glass shattered here and there. All that remains of the plants are woody stalks. The leaves have fallen to the floor and are turned to dust. In the middle of the desolation sits a white marble form with unseeing eyes and unfeeling skin. This is all that remains of the human species. That and a few photos.
