“I try to avoid playing it safe or going for the obvious. Instead, I look at plants from a different perspective and express them in my own way,” South Korean artist Taehyoung Maria Jeon says about a fantastical series of illustrations. “Ironically, having rules is what gives me the freedom to experiment with plant shape.”
Although she’s trained as a printmaker and continues to build compositions in layers, Jeon turns to digital methods as she reimagines the specimens cohabitating in her apartment, beginning with leaves and stems before venturing into surreal terrain. Purple veins, red outlines, and a smattering of stars appear on the imagined life forms, their vivid color palettes furthering their sense of the uncanny.
Titled Plant Series, the project “started as a personal challenge to fill a square canvas with plants, playing with shapes and composition to pack everything in as much as possible,” she says. “As the series continues, the drawings evolve and the nuances shift, but at its heart, it is always about composition, balance, colour, and shape—and hopefully sending out positive vibes, too.”
Dozens of illustrations from the series are compiled in Folium, Jeon’s first monograph from Volume. The publisher functions like Kickstarter and asks readers to back the project before printing. You can reserve your copy on Volume’s website, and find more from the artist on Instagram.
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