But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower uses recorded attempts to virtually access and experience botanical gardens and glasshouses via Googlemaps combined with 3D scans from Kew Gardens, to consider the colonial histories of these sites. The video emerged from an online residency with 11:11 Residency in 2022, looking into botanical histories and the extraction and commodification of plants through the legacies of plant hunters. The botanical sciences that developed in the 17th and 18th century were a project for the ordering, visualising, labelling and categorising of life that feeds into the continued stratification and hierarchies of bodies. There was an established assumption of landscape and plants as passive and inactive matter. Growing from an interest in these sites that impose a surreal and static power over a clean, curated display of ‘nature’ and wondering what ends up in the compost, the piece touches on the mapping, movement and categorisation of plants and their values. Considering the accompanying tensions between preservation, extraction and adaptability prompts questions of what botanical gardens might function as and what plants might look like in the future.

Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human that are wrapped up within queer ecologies. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture, textiles and text, with reference to microscopic life forms, speculative fiction and botanical architecture. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants as well as the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores our interwoven existence with our surroundings through playful thinking on speculative ecologies.

Based in London she is currently working from her studio with Arebyte. Ella studied art in Devon where she grew up, before completing a BA(Hons) in Intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art, 2019. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Skaftfell Seyðisfjörður, Melkweg Expo Amsterdam, Staffordshire St. Gallery London, Artcore Gallery in Derby, with several screenings including the Coventry Biennial 2024, Videoity’s Utopia Today 2024 and Fiber Festival 2021. Recently she was a participant of LungA School Art Programme 2023 in Iceland and CCA Derry~Londonderry’s digital artist in residence.

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