At the BioCost research group, with which I collaborated at the CICA Gallery Artist Residency, I was shown a series of specimens of sea lettuce herbarium sheets. In the sheets, the seaweed is pressed into the frame of a paper until it ends up flat and glued to it. This leaves a measurable record that looks like a scanner.
The point is that the seaweed is not flat and often does not even fit the size of the paper; thus, different types of folds are produced in the seaweed itself, leaving behind thicker greens. These screen prints, whose ink is made from seaweed, reproduce these folds, isolating them from the rest of the plant. They point out the limitations of any instrument to measure a living reality. Each type of fold is a layer upon layer of spirulina, emulating with the screen printing technique the actual process of pressing the algae in herbariums. They are divided into two lots of six specimens, both collected in rafts in the Illa de Arousa area.
Breogán Xague 