Roses Are Red: Art Inspired by Botanical Influences on Human Culture was an exhibit co-created by Ink Dwell and Anjel Van Slyke exploring how plants have shaped our world—and how people have shaped the plant world, over millennia.

The value and impact of botanicals extend far beyond just their visual beauty and each work represents how plants impact a different human sense.

SIGHT:

A 10-foot section of hand painted wallpaper by Jane depicts the evolution of roses from wild to domestic, with 15 intricately painted flowers. The piece illustrates how humans have manipulated plants as well as internal and external spaces with plant-inspired surface design.

Through a closed loop vein structure of leaves, co-curator Anjel Van Slyke, Founder of Crux and Canopy, depicts a model ideal for energy efficiency through a delicately hand cut paper installation.

*The notebooks were created by Olivia San Mateo, Founder of Olive-Route Design

SOUND:

Most of us don’t think of plants as musical organisms, but Dr. Kim Ritman offers evidence that suggests otherwise. In this installation, designed by Ink-Dwell and Van Slyke, Dr. Ritman has recorded the sound a banana plant makes as water flows through its veins–much like the noise of a beating heart.

Bradley Skaught, singer, guitarist and songwriter for Oakland-based band The Bye Bye Blackbirds shares a work composed with various acoustic emmissions of plants.

TOUCH:

Landscape designer Christine Pyers highlights the sense of touch with her plant-scape pods in a storefront garden that provides a place to interact, manipulate and touch plants.

SMELL:

A scent chandelier, designed by Ink Dwell and Van Slyke is modeled around the basic structure of a scent molecule.

TASTE:

For a tasty treat, we shared delicious bites on opening night to highlight botanically inspired cuisine. A fun t-shirt was then hand printed on opening night to represent the sense of “taste” - Eat wild nettles. Saute them in garlic. Use them in a frittata. Yum!

Illustration by: Hannah Berman, Pie Bird Press

Lettering by: Anjel Van Slyke

In 2009, Jane spent four months as an artist in residence at Recology and collected discarded construction scrap used to build walls to create this body of work.

Looking beyond the utilitarian definition, a wall’s function has deep sociological relevance. From prehistoric caves to fanciful wallpapers of the twentieth century, we use walls to express ourselves. We introduce color into a white room, hang art or wallpaper, and make a space our own. However, the overwhelming speed at which walls go up is resulting in harmful consequence to our environment. Jane enjoys exploring the dissonance between sociological necessity of walls and their destructive environmental consequences.

Made from old card boxes delivered by UPS and FedEx, a pile started forming in a storage area. This piece is about circulation — trash, heart, postage, travel — and what sort of impact that has on the Earth.

 DISAPPEARANCE REAPPEARANCE

Disappearance Reappearance celebrates the newly discovered Esha Peak Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep herd unit in the Eastern Sierra range. For over 50 years, this area has not been surveyed because it was thought that no Sierra bighorn occupied this land. In 2010, locals reported sightings of sheep. Sure enough, a 2011 survey discovered a herd unit of 11 sheep. The 11 horns and skulls in this installation duplicate the various ages and genders of the 11 found in Esha Peak and celebrates their natural reappearance in one of their historic ranges.

 HUMAN HEAD STUDY

HOUSE FOR SALE

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SCENT CHANDELIER

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COLOR: A Winter Carnivale

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The Nature of Invention explores the way nature has inspired human invention.

It exists in nature first.

The saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) is critically endangered and originally inhabited a vast area of the Eurasian steppe zone. They also lived here in North America during the Pleistocene. Today a subspecies is found in one location in Russia and three areas in Kazakhstan. It is now extinct in China and southwestern Mongolia. The Mongolian subspecies is found only in western Mongolia.

The nose of a saiga antelope acts like a furnace, heating the cold, chilling air before reaching the lungs in the winter while filtering out dust in the summer.

This saiga stands proudly atop a furnace in a room with a traditional Kazakh pattern on the wall.

The visual update to the Department of Fish and Game’s Sierra Bighorn Recovery Program website engages viewers and encourages them to learn more about Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and the Sierra Bighorn Recovery Program.

Artists for the Amazon is a group of artists brought together by Amazon Aid Foundation (AAF) to raise awareness about the importance of the Amazon Rainforest through art, music, and social media.

This body of work includes important species of trees and animals relevant to the Amazon rainforest that are threatened by the devastating rate of deforestation.

Ink-Dwell also designed the logo for the Foundation’s Acre + Care, an adopt an acre of the rainforest program.

These life-size drawings of sharks swim in front of the patterns of the water currents where they live and were included in an exhibit at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale (MoAFL)

Shark!, an exhibition at MoAFL, takes visitors on a journey through more than 70 artists’ perspectives on these fascinating creatures from predator to victim to pop culture icon. The exhibition was curated by acclaimed marine artist and author, Richard Ellis. It is being presented in association with Nova Southeastern University’s Oceanographic Center.

The original drawings are now in the permanent collection of Nova Southeastern University.

The below images were created for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jane was selected as a recipient of the Bartels Science Illustration Program where she worked with some of the top ornithologists in the world.

Jane was selected to work at The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. The below images were created for use in management plans, site maps, and taxonomy guides.

This gallery showcases images created for booklets about Coiba, an island in the Pacific that was once used as a penitentiary but now protected as a National Park.

• A booklet describing the new management plan of Coiba National Park
• A tablet for fisheries surrounding the park
• Diving and snorkeling site maps for a comprehensive dive guide

CAT — Computer Automated Taxonomy is an online computer automated taxonomy software to help identify porcellanid crabs’ unique anatomy. Using the provided crab illustrations, the identifying characteristics were highlighted in a clear and attractive way.

This collection of illustrations were used for an online information system of shorefishes of the tropical Eastern Pacific. The painting of the gobies illustrates the slight differences between the common green banded goby and red-cheeked goby, a new species found in Honduras.

This was one of Jane’s most memorable experiences.

For three months, she lived in Yosemite National Park as a Science Visualization Fellow through the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. During this time, Jane joined field researchers in the back country as they studied the Yosemite toad, invertebrates, meadow encroachment, Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and much more.

Never had she been so closely interactive with the natural world every day. It was truly inspiring and from this experience grew the Migrating Mural: Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep.