This new triptych of Aubusson tapestries extends aurèce vettier’s long-standing research into sur-nature and the evolution of speculative botanical forms. The project originates in a vast dataset assembled in 2019, consisting of millions of herbarium plates used to train a GAN -for Generative Adversarial Network. From this training emerged a series of anti-Darwinian plants: impossible organisms whose fragile logic contrasts with the adaptive intelligence of real flora. These forms first appeared as painted silhouettes on beige grounds, recalling dried specimens. Later, using “lifting” algorithms, the artist transformed the flat plants into three-dimensional models. He then spent months collecting small fragments of branches in forests, reconstructing the algorithmic forms into wooden maquettes that were eventually cast in bronze. Some of these sculptures were gilded with gold and palladium, drawing nearer to the rarefied nature of peradam, the fictional precious matter described by René Daumal in his unfinished novel Mount Analogue.

The tapestries presented at Design Miami depict the exact moment of transmutation between plant and peradam: the threshold where vegetation begins to crystallize into precious material. Woven at the historic Aubusson manufactories in France, they retain the beige grounds of drying herbarium sheets, yet within the vegetal structures glimmers of gold already appear, seizing stems and leaves as if nature itself were slowly turning metallic. As the artist asks: as humans keep deepening their extractive desires, often in ways that harm the living world, will anything organic remain that still sings and whispers?