Design by Nature - Eye of the Beholder - Fine Art Print

The title work encompassing all the iconic images from the series of works titled ‘Design by Nature’ and 
featured in the ‘Eye of the Beholder’ Exhibition 2024.

Seven lessons we could learn from the natural world
This work comprising the seven independent artworks take the natural ‘analogue’ detail of essential icons of the natural world and are highlighted and contrasted against underlying contemporary digital patterns, created by si homfray especially for this range, representative of our very modern digital lives.

The seven works:

1. Tireless and Focussed - A Leaf with its intricate and delicate network of veins, offers insight into how light is converted into energy and channelled throughout plant species, day in day out. Relentlessly working hard and stubbornly determined to achieve this purpose in life - to get the job done round the clock. ( Perspicacity and Perseverance )

2. Resilient and rubbery - A Fern - A species that grows back swiftly determined to populate its landscape, bouncing back from even the most catastrophic of events such as fire. This plant has travelled with the planet from the earliest days of life on earth, determined to keep growing, prepared to grow back bigger better and stronger, prepared for the next event life throws at them in an amazingly efficient series of differing axes.

3. Resourceful and ingenious - Romanescu Broccolli offers a great insight into how nature uses remarkable patterns. This plant pattern, based on a spiralling fibonacci mathematical sequence work aims to demonstrate how plants are constantly searching and seeking new solutions to old problems - redesigning themselves to fit a new world with the minimum of space.

4. Adaptable and flexible - An Ammonite - This highlighted drawing of an Ammonite serves to illustrate the timeless flexibility and adaptability of creatures since life began on earth to change to their circumstances. The subject of the prevalence of these creatures and how they have reshaped and remoulded themselves for millions of years has fascinated Si spending a great deal of time with friends down on the Jurassic coast of Dorset.

5. Patient and stress free - A Coral Sea Fan - The skeleton of the delicate structure of a coral sea fan was chosen for this work to highlight the enormous lengths of time taken by living organisms, such as our precious coral, takes to build itself. Probably one of the most delicate as well as most beautiful structures on the planet, the detail and elegance of the fan serves the artist’s intention to emphasise how we should learn from this lesson in nature to take our time and that patience will reward us with the greatest of rewards.

6. Connected and communicating - An Oak Tree - Oak trees are iconic, symbols of steadfastness, but they are also, along with so much plant life and the funghii, connected by their roots. Woodlands, forests and the myriad of living organisms connect, communicate, share and form stronger collectives for it. This lesson seems important for the fractured state of the world today.

7. Alive and kicking - The Human Skull - At the centre of this piece is the need to convey the important message that although we often think in ‘human centric’ terms, the world our planet, and all living things in it are connected together, talking in varous languages and sharing the same space. As human beings we could learn from other living systems for the period of our short lives, embracing every vital moment of every day.