'A beautiful, quiet, achingly tender book' Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

In the book Understorey, artist and writer Anna Chapman Parker documents with prose and strikingly original sketches a year spent observing weeds, our most common and accessible plants. In gardens, on roadsides, or gathered around municipal lamps, weeds offer a spectacle of wild life all year round. The benefits we derive from our presence in vegetation are known, but what are these faintly familiar shapes that accompany our every step, yet go unnoticed? How and when do they appear, bloom, and retreat, and what would it mean to observe them?

She also reflects on how they appear in other artists' works, from a thorny vegetation framing a 6th-century Byzantine manuscript to an installation with climbing vegetation in contemporary Berlin, exploring the art of attention even to the smallest things.

Pages: 288, Dimensions: 14.8x14.8cm