This artist captures the secret world of plants in spectacular detail

It wasn't always an art project. 

In the summer of 2018, Sara Angelucci was in mourning, grieving the death of her sister "I felt very paralyzed," says the Toronto-based artist. "I just couldn't process what had happened," she explains, and there were days when creating seemed impossible. 

Unable to make art, Angelucci turned her attention to the "very small" garden she was growing outside. "I started to become really curious about the plants," she says, and while some people might just download an app — pointing their phone at every weed and wildflower — Angelucci chose another course of action. Taking her laptop scanner into the yard, she began to catalogue everything that sprouted around her.

From those experimental beginnings, Angelucci developed two ongoing bodies of work, Nocturnal Botanical Ontario and Bella di Notte, and selections from both of those series are now appearing at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. At first glance, the pictures appearing there seem strange and alluring — too eerie to be real. She makes images of wild and writhing bouquets, illuminated tangles of wiry stems and ragged leaves — flora that floats in a void as infinite as outer space.

But despite the sense of mystery, each frame is inherently ordinary. Angelucci draws your focus to common plants, common insects — things you'd find in a backyard or laneway. In the title cards, the artist often labels the organisms that appear in each image. Buttercups mingle with clover and burdock; a knot of leafy jewel weed obscures a tuft of dill. But encounter the work in person, and you might find yourself lingering with wonder, mesmerized by the glow of a snail's shell or the halo of a downy bud.

"For me, it's really about decentering the human in nature," says Angelucci, a Toronto-based artist who was longlisted for this year's Scotiabank Photography Award. And the effect is especially apparent when the flowers on the wall are bigger than your head. (As it happens, you can find two of her mural-sized prints at another exhibition in the GTA this spring; Undergrowth, at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, surveys the last 10 years of Angelucci's practice, art that often deals with environmental themes.) 

But even at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, where the photos are more like the size of movie posters, the scale of the work is meant to wow.

"You get close and you see this incredible detail, and I think it gives you a reverence for nature," says the artist, and she remembers feeling struck by that feeling herself, back when the project began.

While working on an early scan, the artist realized she could capture details that would never be noticed by the naked eye. "I was astonished at what was there," she says, and since those first experiments at home in Toronto, she's expanded the project — exploring other places where she feels a personal connection. Much of Nocturnal Botanical Ontario covers the land near her cottage in the Pretty River Valley, and for Bella di Notte, she travelled to her family's ancestral home in Le Marche, Italy.  

Wherever she goes, Angelucci works outdoors — at night — and her equipment is minimal. To create an image, she requires a scanner and computer, of course, and if she's ventured beyond her garden, she'll pack a portable generator, lamps and a few protective items — things like a plastic drop sheet (for the electrical gadgets) and mosquito netting (for her).  

Before she turns up with her gear, however, the artist has already researched the landscape. Angelucci has developed a habit of identifying the plants she sees in the daytime, often texting a botanist friend when she's stumped. She will go on walks, and the occasional kayak trip, to scout new locations. And when it comes time to arrange a piece, she gathers specimens in situ, collecting plants she's observed growing side by side. 

But "companion plants" can have complicated histories. Are these shrubs and grasses native to where they were found? Were they introduced 200 years ago? Or 25? Are they benign or an invasive species? That information is never spelled out in Angelucci's work, but there's an implied tension beneath the beauty of her images. And even without a trained eye, there's a sense that we — like the plants — are all just visitors here, changing with the passing of the seasons.

In the gallery, it's not always clear if the images were made in Ontario or Italy; a red poppy, for example, could bloom in a garden from either place. But there's a clear sense of time as you walk through the room. A sprig of milkweed blossoms in one image, but has gone to seed in another.

Even the scans themselves are time-based photographs, Angelucci explains, captured over the course of three minutes instead of a fraction of a second like a typical photograph. Sometimes, when she works in the field, the light of the scanner attracts an uninvited insect, and if a moth happens to flit across the glass, its pirouette will be captured beat by beat. The movement can produce a colourful trail of zig-zagging glitches. "You can see it unfolding like a little film," she says, and it's a reminder that these still-life compositions aren't so still at all. The world turns, and nature persists — but the scanner can capture a fleeting moment at a resolution high enough to demand your attention.

"Most of us don't pay attention to plants," says Angelucci, describing the phenomenon as "plant blindness," a term coined by biologists J.H. Wandersee and E.E. Schussler. For the artist, Nocturnal Botanical strives to be an antidote to that problem. "It's making myself and others aware of what's there." 

"We need to understand how our environment is changing, and how the plants are changing — because of climate change, rainfall, heat," she says. And for the foreseeable future she plans to continue developing Nocturnal Botanical Ontario and Bella di Notte, keeping a close eye on what's growing around her. 

"I'm exploring different territories and seasons still," says Angelucci. "There's still so much that I want to discover."

Nocturnal Botanical. Sara Angelucci. To June 15 at Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto. www.bulgergallery.com.