Annie Trevorah, an award-winning British artist, will unveil her solo exhibition Triffids at Pump House Gallery from the 18th to the 22nd of October, 2023.
Curated by Francesca Dobbe and advised by Kensu Oteng, the exhibition takes inspiration from John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which a carnivorous plant runs amok across the English countryside after escaping its experimental greenhouse. Trevorah reconfigures various textures and forms found in Chelsea Physic Garden’s greenhouses to imagine this species in its destructive hybridisation and how it may flourish in a future hostile to human survival.
Spread over Pump House Galleries’ four floors and featuring a combination of hanging, floor and wall-based sculptures, Triffids features unique sensory structures for plants that breathe, eat, digest and move while sharing many of the same interactive systems as humans. Among such chimeras are plants equipped with armour, thorns, spines and noxious defences that threaten the hubris of human exceptionalism in which we are predators but never the prey