crystals show how they grow within a garden of glass petri dishes

Natural growth shapes art series Crystal Garden: Seasons

The collective Beauty of Science unveils the art series Crystal Garden: Seasons, where rows of glass Petri dishes show how colorful crystals naturally grow within them. Unfolding as a collaboration between the artist and a natural material, it is the former that establishes the conditions, such as the temperature, saturation, container, and pigment, and then steps back to let the crystallization take place. Soon, these minerals expand and take the form of the Petri dishes, creating scenic landscapes brought about by their own courses.

The first forms appear almost tentatively: pale filaments spreading across the shallow floor of the glass containers. Then, over hours and days, they thicken. Branches multiply. Clusters gather and bloom. What begins as a controlled chemical solution becomes a terrain dense with spires, lattices, and mineral thickets. Each composition distills the imagery of a season and the colors associated with the respective period, hence the title Crystal Garden: Seasons: cool blues and whites, saturated greens, deep reds, burnished golds, and more. Soon, they overlap, bursting with lively shades that now fill the glass Petri dishes with life and nature.

all images courtesy of Beauty of Science

Colors depict the shades associated with each season

The collective Beauty of Science, founded by Yan Liang, Ph.D., who is the main creator of the project Beautiful Chemistry, says that the word ‘garden’ in the crystal art series is a metaphor for what is natural and what is man-made. ‘A garden is a space where nature and human intention intertwine: neither wholly wild nor entirely artificial,’ the text discussing the series states. There’s only so much the artist can do, and that is to prepare the space for the crystals to cultivate themselves. Once that’s done, they allow them to grow on their own.

In a way, the process speaks for the seasons themselves, seen as uncontrollable forces of nature. What comes through is a series of crystalline forms and colors that can convey the organic cadence of nature: slowly branching out until it multiplies. For the design team, the Crystal Garden: Seasons series is an expressive way to bring up ‘Eastern philosophical and poetic sensibility,’ as they describe it. The glass Petri dishes then become part of the subject, the home, though temporary, where these minerals can safely and vividly grow.

the collective Beauty of Science unveils the art series Crystal Garden: Seasons