Flora and Fauna Paintings (25 mud paintings)

The son of an archaeologist and natural history museum worker, Alexis Rockman has been obsessed with zoology, botany and taxonomy since childhood. His work challenges traditional ways of seeing, and seeks to re-categorise the living world according to natural hierarchies and relationships. In 1994 Rockman embarked on a month long journey to the rainforest jungles of Guyana, South America with fellow artists Bob Braine and Mark Dion. While traveling through the jungles, Rockman insisted that he wanted to invent nothing, that he would only paint what he saw. This complete set of twenty-five unique mud paintings evolved from Rockman's travels to Guyana, and were executed using mud from the jungles that the artist brought back to New York.