Florilegium

Jacques Nimki//Ikon Eastside

Jacques Nimki’s practice involves the use of wild plants to communicate ideas about environmental and cultural issues. He adapts archaic processes more commonly associated with the Victorian era of exploration and collection, analysing urban plant life, like a botanist, but in a deliberately unscientific way.

For this exhibition, Nimki created Florilegium, an indoor meadow of the kind of plants that grow in the neglected and hidden areas of Birmingham’s Eastside district. The artist researched and catalogued these specimens and produced a large field in Ikon Eastside – a disused factory that Ikon occupied. Florilegium invited the viewer to consider that which is often overlooked and widely regarded as worthless or insignificant.