Essay
By Kay Mohlman

Dutch artist Marisa Keller presents new works in Nature Constructed, a solo exhibition that combines Keller’s masterful printmaking skills with an exceptional sensitivity to the natural environment of Singapore, her long-time place of residence. The show consists of seventeen relief print and painted works on canvas, and six works on paper that combine traditional and digital printmaking techniques. The canvas pieces bring us through the artistic manipulation and elaboration of a single idea, namely, the imprinted form of a plant. The paper works extend this theme to the earth itself and other earth-like forms, which appear as quasi-botanical incarnations in various stages of growth or decay.
Of the canvas pieces, the first cluster features imprints of individual plants or parts thereof. This group includes the twelve Herbarium series prints and the four larger rectangular pieces consisting of the vertical tryptic Reaching for the Sky and the horizontal Wings. As an artist used to working in the broad sweep of a landscape tradition, Keller’s challenge here was to see what she could bring forth from focusing on isolated forms only, extracted from nature. The starting point was the plants themselves, which Keller selected to show off variations in texture and form. She then grouped the Herbarium pieces into three “families” according to shadings that were based on secretions given off by the plants themselves, as they went through the press. What emerges is each plant’s own personal signature, as seen against the combination of painterly hues that are part of Keller’s artistic repertoire and that lend coherence to the series overall.
The upright expressiveness of the large-scale tryptic Reaching for the Sky I, II, III captures the momentum of how these mature palms open out, revealing their character as the extroverts of the plant families featured in the exhibition. Compared to the smaller Herbarium pieces the mood here is more exuberant, yet tinged with overtones of foreboding. The red background of the middle piece of the tryptic suggests an element of danger, and even the title itself can be likened to a plea for help. A plaintive quality is even more apparent in the ethereal Wings. Fittingly, this transcendent image evokes the raw material from which it was produced, a detached banana tree frond that was itself transformed during nature’s own continuous cycle of death and regeneration.
Moving on to the magnificent Rainforest View, the exhibition’s premier offering, Keller constructs an entire botanical micro-environment by relying on the same garden-gathered materials and hand-operated pressing techniques she used to create the smaller works. The 350 x 300cm creation hangs in two vertical canvas scrolls. Each scroll is composed of individual panels that were sized to fit the printing press and stitched together. To build up the composite picture, Keller had to put each panel through the press at least five times.
For this monumental task, the assembling and printing processes themselves became a kind of tribute to nature. As the artist observes,
I could only try to mimic something so vast and big, using real materials. To handle only one large leaf is already messy and makes you realize the limitations of your body and the craft, so you can see how difficult it is to create a bigger work from natural materials. If you can do it, then it changes your perception of what you see everyday all around you…we never consider the actual size of plants and trees. Only when you have to clear them away do you realize how big they actually are.
The result of her efforts is breathtaking. The storybook-like composition is that of a window created by a frame of rainforest around the canvas and—notably—the absence of any colour or greenery in the middle. The extravagant density of growth in all shapes and sizes at the bottom of the canvas gradually changes form and becomes less pronounced in the middle; the few tendrils that appear in the topmost panels are suspended like question marks, no longer the substance of the upper reaches, but only its accents.
Inevitably, our attention is first drawn to the intensity of colours and textures that make the work come alive. We can delight in its tactile richness while knowing this “authentic” rainforest is not composed of real plants but only their imprints, captured through the painstaking process of building up of the composite piece. As with the smaller prints, the initial mesmerizing effects are also due to Keller’s hand-painted colour enhancements and blending that serve to focus our attention on different sections and unify the work.
Yet the artist is not only telling a positive story here, as Rainforest View is as much defined by the negative absence of its centre as by its living perimeter. The window is the silence that makes what the rest of the work has to say even more pronounced. By placing us, the viewers, inside this juxtaposition, and by making the juxtaposition one of such grand dimensions, we can refer back to the title of the exhibition and apprehend how the work itself is a symbolic mediation between the literal act of constructing nature, and the prospect of a nature constructed out of existence.
The orientation of the canvas works as a whole is one of physicality: tactile impressions created through the bodily labour of hand and eye. With the paper-based prints, the artistic sensibility changes to something more abstract and cerebral. Keller arrived at these provocative formulations primarily through manipulating digital media images, with traditional printmaking techniques in a more supporting role. Though the creative process may vary, she maintains continuity throughout by using the paper works to echo botanical themes found in the canvas series, and to push these to the extreme.
All six images on paper are anchored by a central circular form. Three of the prints portray alternative worlds where the botanical, as we know it, is still viable and recognizable. Nightfall recalls the canvas tryptic, but the daylight palms have here given way to a single ghostly frond cast against the dark sky with an enormous empty moon. Each of the two Oasis works seems to compress the botanical density found in Rainforest View into an entire microcosmic watery world. The resulting plant-laden, globe-like forms are both enticing and a bit disorienting.
The remaining three paper works seem to suggest uncertain futures, the endpoint of processes in which natural habitats and the earth itself are ever more pressed for survival. The algae-coloured, webby patterns of the two Rising Water prints project us into a future that is submerged and decomposing, in complete contrast to the leached and criss-crossed surfaces found in the last print, Dry Earth. Will our own collective fate be one of inundation or desiccation? The earthly and unearthed visions of Marisa Keller’s work in this exhibition let us ponder these matters while never losing sight of the beauty of the natural world, as it continues to erode and regenerate.

Kay Mohlman is a Singapore-based writing consultant, nature enthusiast, and long-time admirer of Marisa Keller’s work.
ⓒKay Mohlman