A plant's form is not arranged for our sake. And yet we often find in it a sense of "beauty," of "solace." Perhaps this feeling is both an admiration for form itself and, as the biophilia hypothesis suggests, an instinct we carry as living things.

Over the past year, through a film and a ZINE, I have explored a single question — where does the beauty of a plant reside? — by setting photographic records alongside abstract graphics.

Along the way, another question surfaced: is this attraction to plants really a rational one? I find ease in the forms of leaves and stems, yet the countless roots reaching out from a base, or the minute structures inside a flower, can stir something close to revulsion. It led me to imagine that comfort and revulsion might arise from the same source — an "uncanniness" built up through experience, or an instinct of the living body, akin to trypophobia, the aversion to dense clusters.

If so, then the very act of finding nature beautiful may itself be a "borrowed emotion," handed down through evolution. "Borrowed from Nature" is the title of the series as a whole — the film, the ZINE, and the works around them — yet it also holds a second meaning for this piece alone: that what we take from nature may be not only its forms, but the feeling of beauty itself.

This website is a medium — a device — for observing, through the interplay of the photographic and the abstract, where a plant's beauty resides, and how far the feelings we direct toward it are truly our own. I made it as a place to look, consciously, at a longing for nature that many of us have carried without ever noticing.