Future Flora 2025
Future Flora repositions everyday plants at the heart of biodiversity, encouraging reflection on their future within local ecosystems. Inspired by herbarium practices and the tradition of botanical collecting, these photographs create space for reconsidering species often overlooked or dismissed as weeds, revealing their cultural significance, resilience, and ecological value within the wider environment.
By elevating familiar plants such as daisies, dandelions, and other commonplace species, the work challenges hierarchies of value within the natural world and questions how human attitudes shape our understanding of what deserves protection. The photographs transform ordinary specimens into objects of contemplation, inviting viewers to consider the interconnected relationships between plants, wildlife, climate, and human activity.
The project emerges from growing concerns surrounding climate change and its visible impact on seasonal rhythms. In recent years, hundreds of plant species have been recorded flowering across the UK during mid-winter, an occurrence scientists identify as a significant indicator of environmental disruption. Warmer temperatures are altering natural flowering cycles, unsettling long-established ecological patterns and affecting the intricate relationships between plants, pollinators, and other species that depend upon them.
Drawing upon the visual language of scientific classification and archival preservation, Future Flora exists between documentation and speculation. The photographs present plants as both contemporary subjects and future artefacts, imagining a time when familiar species may be viewed as records of ecological change. In doing so, the work considers how climate breakdown is reshaping landscapes and challenges viewers to reflect on the fragility of seemingly ordinary forms of nature.
Rather than presenting these species solely as botanical specimens, the photographs frame them as living indicators of environmental change and collective memory. They suggest that the future of biodiversity depends not only on the conservation of rare or endangered species but also on recognising the importance of the common plants that sustain local ecosystems. Through this reimagining, Future Florainvites a deeper engagement with the overlooked flora that surrounds us and asks what role these species might play in an increasingly uncertain ecological future.
Flora Shutter Hub publication Autumn 2026 selected work from Future Flora
Future Flora Big Screen, City Park and Darley Street Market Screen, Bradford 26 June - 31 August 2025
