Diana Scherer is a German visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Her work encompasses photography, material research, plant root-weaving and sculpture.
One of her famous works is a beautiful dress grown from plantroots that was featured in the exhibition Fashioned from Nature at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2018. She collaborated with biologists to find a technique to control the growth of plant roots.
Her project “Interwoven,” used techniques of root system domestication which transforms the natural network of plant roots into an innovative and diverse textile-like material. By using underground geometric templates as moulds, roots are channelled as they grow, forming a new and mesmerizing interlocking patterns. In this way, Scherer acknowledged ‘the embodied “intelligence” of living botanical matter.’
“Darwin discovered that plants are a lot more intelligent than everybody thought. For contemporary botanists, this buried matter is still a wondrous land. There is a global investigation to discover this hidden world. I also want to explore it and apply the ‘intelligence’ of plants in my work,” she writes on her website.
