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ARTIST GRANTS 2025. Garden inspirations, from root to sky
- May 8
- 7 min read
Infranco and Gulacsy see art as a quest
By Linda Falcone
Originally published in
RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine
On mornings at Il Palmerino, as soon as the weather improves, many a landscape artist from various corners of the globe, come to capture its gardens, immortalised on page by author Vernon Lee, and on canvas by painter Lola Costa, successive owners of the Tuscan estate, over the course of 115 years between them. In Autumn, still-life painters delight in the property’s overripe persimmons, or celebrate the growth of wild poppies among its planted flowers in late Spring. Yet the two artists at work there most recently are looking at gardens in a different way – from root to sky – as part of an artist residency and production grant, that kicked off in 2025, as part of a larger 3-year programme: ‘The Garden Project’, supported by Calliope Arts and Il Palmerino, in collaboration with Museo Sant’Orsola and the British Institute of Florence.
Silvia Infranco, Tellus, detail made with wheat, barley, pigments, oxides and wax
Once completed, the results of artists Silvia Infranco and Cyrielle Gulacsy’s labours will be on display during a double exhibition event, co-curated by Morgane Lucquet Laforgue and Marina Dacci. It will be held at Museo Sant’Orsola and Cultural Association Il Palmerino, in the spring of 2027, prior to the museum’s opening one year later. Infranco takes us on a multi-century historical journey, in which plants, and prescriptions derived from them, are a source of power for women, as well as a symbol of their vocation for caring for others, at home or in community settings. The art voyage Gulacsy proposes is off-planet, but it begins with a ‘bit of earth’ and the industrious insects that help it bloom.
Bolognese artist Silvia Infranco plucks a sage leaf from its low-growing shrub, after having snapped Polaroids of its growing, at different times of the day. She crosses the garden to the heavy wooden table that will be her work station for the next two months. She knows that ‘sage’ comes from the root word ‘save’, in Italian salvia, and that it was cultivated across the country for centuries in nunneries and family-grown gardens, for its healing properties, to combat inflammation, treat respiratory and digestive ailments, and to boost menopausal health. Silvia’s most recent research on a wide variety of medicinal plants and their traditional uses thanks to sources linked to ancient Greece, including Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, eleventh-century poet Odo of Meung, German abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen and clinical physician Emile Gilbert. Next, she searched through medieval manuscripts at the National State Archives and the National Central Library in Florence, which enabled her to collect additional proof that the art of healing, in Italy, was largely a women’s prerogative, at least until the rise of chemistry as a formal discipline. For this project, the vegetation she is studying to incorporate into her artwork, either physically or symbolically, comes from several sources.
She chooses among plants described in a seventeenth-century Florentine manuscript, or those pressed between the pages of Il Palmerino’s herbarium, created by Fiorenza Angeli, Lola Costa’s daughter, in the 1980s, now a family heirloom. Many of the plants Fiorenza picked and preserved are still in bloom at Il Palmerino, and used by her daughters in home remedies. Infranco is also studying a garden that grew five hundred centuries earlier at Sant’Orsola. Only the skeleton of the ancient pharmacy where its plants were processed has survived. It is called la spezieria, (from the word ‘spice’), where nuns mixed ointments, prepared tonics using medicinal herbs, or crafted casts and bandages, with wax made from animal fats and, later, beeswax.
Infranco’s works use wax as well, and she sets up a pot of it on her portable canister stove. There is something magnetically appealing about the melting of wax, and I watch her preparations in silence, before the artist speaks, “My research develops by observing how different organic surfaces respond to events that influence their memory. I mostly use organic materials, like paper, wood and wax. I am fascinated with the symbolic uses of wax, because, historically, it was used for preservation, healing and remembrance.”
“Process is also important in my research,” Infranco continues. “I start by coating a wooden base with wax, using an iron to smooth out the uneven surface. Then I engrave the wax and dye it with bitumen and/or natural pigments, and then wipe off the excess. I repeat the process over and over again, creating layers, in order to explore the different layers of memory, and to render them palpable.” Her final works will incorporate plant fragments, parts of historical written remedies, and even prayers for healing, as she forms panels and a manuscript-inspired installation. Silvia will use a variety of techniques including maceration in water to create the paper utilized in her works. “Water heals, fertilises and purifies, but it also causes decomposition. Water, like wax, is strongly linked to the experience of touch, to the sensitivity of heat and cold, to the idea of erasing or sealing, and it carries strong symbolism,” the artist explains.
“I chose Fiorenza Angeli’s herbarium as my starting point, because it represents the memory of Il Palmerino’s garden, but it also incapsulates the memories of her family,” Infranco says. “The Sant’Orsola garden interests me because the concept of care is taken further, outside the home, and into a monastic setting. From the Middle Ages onwards, plant medicine has largely been in the hands of women, and chemical medicine in the hands of men. Throughout history, the knowledge of plants and the prescriptions related to them – whether written or verbal – became a source of female agency, and I strive to record and evoke that reality in different ways, by creating works on panel and paper, or photographic works, book art and sculptures that I sometimes insert in found objects.”
Not far from Infranco’s workbench, is French artist Cyrielle Gulacsy, the project’s second awardee, who usually works out of her Paris studio. She is up early as well, and on the lookout for bees, which will be the protagonist of her Florence installation. It seems apropos, in my own mind, as a swarm of bees was once used as a symbol of Medici power, where Grand Duke Ferdinando I was identified with the queen bee, before anyone knew that the head of the hive was actually female. Gulacsy is amused by my mention of the historical mix-up, but her intent takes the symbolic power of bees far beyond the dynasty’s landscape. She is looking to capture what she calls bees’ ‘cosmic dimension’. She shares the tiny screen of her digital infrared camera – the first tool used in her art production process – to explain what she means. Bees, when captured in infrared images, seem to mimic the light of miniscule stars. In her eyes, bees form garden constellations that bring the cosmos closer, right into our own garden patch, in fact. Her plan for the grant project is to transfer her collection of infra-red images onto fabric; they will serve as the base for cyanotype works, created using an iron-salt solution, a sunbath and a water wash.
The cyanotype’s deep blue recalls the cosmos too. If all the stars align Gulacsy hopes to display the finished piece as a cupola-like textile installation inside Sant’Orsola complex’s Inner Church. No longer consecrated, this once-holy space inside the fourteenth-century convent will form the hub of Museo Sant’Orsola – together with the ‘Outside Church’ and its well-preserved excavation site – when the future museum is inaugurated, at least in part, in 2028. Star-studded cupolas are a well-recognised feature in Florence, with domes at the Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce, and the Old Sacristy at the Basilica of San Lorenzo having star-map motifs, but never before have such stars been earthly constellations, made with light emitted by garden bees.
As far as star systems go, Gulacsy has been studying astronomy for years. Her widely acclaimed ‘dot’ paintings are teeming with all that makes the heavenly bodies heavenly: light, heat and every range of hue. At the same time, her art stands motionless, as if frozen, once framed by the inquiring gaze. Experiencing Gulacsy’s works is like looking at a starry night, but in full colour, and with no need to crane the neck. She credits the Herschel family – John and his father William, not William’s sister Caroline, for the latest direction her research has taken.
“William Herschel discovered infrared, by dispersing light with a prism, to create a rainbow. His intent was to measure the heat of each colour. He noticed that the thermometer recorded higher temperatures as it went from blue to red. What surprised him was that beyond the spectrum of visible light, temperatures became hotter still,” explains Gulacsy. “To produce my art, I started using infra-red photography, the same camera fitted inside the James Webb telescope, to investigate the universe’s beginnings. I used it to look at our feet! Only later, after I’d already started creating cyanotype works based on this photography, did I learn that William’s son invented cyanotypes! When I started combining these two methods, I had no idea I would be connecting a nineteenth-century father and son in my work.” [For more on cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, [see Restoration Converations Issue 9].
Gulacsy’s connection to science did not begin with the Herschels. It started with her interest in physics. “I recently came across David Elbaz’s book The Best Trick of Light by David Elbaz; he explains how, since the beginning of the universe, matter organises thanks to light. In order for particles to agglomerate, light particles are emitted. So, the more complex an object is, the more light gets produced. This reality can be observed in stars, galaxies and nebulas,” says Gulacsy, “but it is even more exciting to consider that the human body – and life in general – is the most complex object the universe has created. We humans emit 200,000 times more photons than the Sun, in scale and in the infrared spectrum. If we were to take that further, if one centimetre square of a human is 200,000 times brighter than one centimetre square of a star – then we are stars too! This idea took my breath away, as a person and an artist, and I felt I needed to see this light ‘in the living’. Prior to studying bees, I was studying stars, their distances and their relationship between time and space. It’s funny how that ultimately led me to look at something within arm’s reach, found in any blooming garden. I put on my beekeepers suit and feel like an astronaut! What I am observing now in the garden, still looks like the sky; the parallel is very interesting. I want my art to be about exploration: for the viewer to think they are seeing something, and then discover they are actually seeing something else. That is how art becomes memorable, when it sparks a realisation, just like science does.” LINDA FALCONE
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