In Nurture Studies, Diana Scherer turns the growth of a plant into a study in form. Flowers are grown from seed within vessels that constrain the development of their root systems, allowing the hidden architecture beneath the soil to take the shape of the container. After months of cultivation, the vessels are removed and the roots are revealed as delicate, sculptural structures—natural forms carrying the precise memory of an object that is no longer there.
The work depends on an unusual collaboration between design and growth. The vessel establishes the parameters, but the plant determines what happens within them. Each species responds differently, producing roots with distinct density, colour, texture and structure. What begins as a simple act of cultivation becomes a process of shaping without directly making: the form is designed indirectly, through conditions given to a living material.
Scherer has described the roots themselves as resembling different kinds of yarn, an observation that would later lead her to investigate their potential as a material for weaving.
The resulting photographs present these temporary constructions with the restraint of botanical specimens or objects in an archive. A flower remains attached to the root system that sustained it, while the absent vessel survives only as an impression in its form. Nurture Studies makes visible a part of the plant ordinarily hidden from view, turning growth itself into a method of making—and revealing how much of a form can be designed simply by giving nature a boundary.
