Lindsay Sekulowicz is an artist and researcher currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, exploring ethnobotanical artefacts of the Northwest Amazon and the role of drawing and graphic practice within Indigenous cosmovision.
She studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art before being awarded the RSA John Kinross Scholarship in 2006, spending six months drawing at the natural history museum Museo La Specola in Florence. This led to a decade-long collaboration with the museum’s biologists, involving research in scientific and historical archives and fieldwork across Asia, Africa and South America. A further RSA-supported award, the Barns-Graham Residency with the D’Arcy Thompson Museum, Dundee, followed in 2013. Most recently, she received the William Littlejohn Award, which has supported fieldwork in the Upper Rio Negro region of the Brazilian Amazon, where she works alongside Indigenous artists and craftspeople to explore the connections between artistic practice, botanical knowledge, and Indigenous understandings of the natural world.
For the past twenty years, the RSA has shaped my practice. The John Kinross Scholarship took me to Florence, where long hours drawing in a quiet natural history museum led me to think deeply about the relationship between art and science, language and drawing, a period which defined everything I’ve made since. That award, and the two that followed, let me move between museum research and fieldwork, testing ideas through a practice grounded in research. Today, I think of drawing as a way to rethink histories, engage with ethnographic collections and re-imagine plant worlds.
The works shown in this exhibition span the last several years of my doctoral study: lines drawn in soot, printed directly from plants, and traced after historical artefacts. Together, they explore physical and metaphysical transformation in Amazonia. I owe much of the time I’ve had to research, think and make to the RSA’s support since 2006.
