The Herbarium Unbound: The Plants of The Wash is an exhibition of four artists, Harriet Tarlo, Mary Naylor, Jane Prophet and James Murray-White as a part of the GroundWork Gallery Residency 2026, The Wash Estuary. It is open from 5 November to 19 December.

Opening event

All welcome: 4 November, 5.30-7.30. Poetry Performances and meet the artists.

Sir Joseph Banks Centre, 7-13 Bridge Street, Horncastle, LN9 5NZ

The Herbarium

Herbaria have historically collected, classified and preserved plants as individual specimens, removed from their complex living environments. This exhibition by three women artists offers alternative ways of looking, attending to plants as living participants in intricate networks of relationships. It is situated in the landscapes of The Wash, all artists drawing on fieldwork and close observation, with James Murray White’s film providing a glimpse of the vastness of The Wash on the small screen. 

Plants shaped by everyday life

The exhibition also considers the ways plants shape, and are shaped by, everyday life, through their medicinal and food properties, social histories, and folkloric associations across generations. Archival research includes engagement with the herbarium at the Joseph Banks Society in Horncastle and a particular interest in women plant collectors and botanical artists such as Catherine Maria Cautley and E.M. Lane-Claypon.

Through poems, compositions made from plants themselves, and prints, the artists offer interconnected perspectives on the botanical world and particular plants. Their works move between intimate observation and the wider landscape, bringing overlooked details and histories into view and re-scaling our attention to the plant beings that lie at the basis of all life and are understood here through their animate actions, relationships, histories and places, rather than through classification alone.