Frictions in Houseplant Art: Mediating Domestic Plants – Countering Plant Deafness

Anette Vandsø
 

While landscape painting is an established aesthetic category with a rich tradition of critical scholarship, the depiction of houseplants in interior paintings has remained largely untheorized. This presentation argues that the establishment of ‘houseplant art’ as a coherent category with its own history and aesthetics, proves to be the fruitful ‘friction’ that uncovers new layers in well-known paintings allowing us to see and study the rise of indoor nature. In Hidden Plant Stories we have systematically collected Danish paintings featuring houseplants from 1820 to 1920. Through the exhibition series Plantfever – The World in the Windowsill three partnering museums activated the historical material in dialogue with their own museum histories and collections. The presentation examines this as a visual counterculture, that focusses on marginalized plants, challenging not only plant blindness, but indeed the “plant deafness,” that prohibits us from paying attention to the layered stories concerning care, gender, class, coloniality and ecology in which the house plant has its roots.

BIO

Anette Vandsø is an associate professor in Aesthetics and Culture, and co-director of the research programme Environmental Media and Aesthetics at Aarhus University. Her current research explores the aesthetics and culture of environmental concerns often with a focus on ubiquitous phenomena of plants and sound. Vandsø is PI on several research and dissemination projects on environmental humanities in collaboration with art museums, including Hidden Plant Stories (2023-2026) partnering Ordrupgaard, the Hirschsprung Collection, and Faaborg museum, supported by the Velux Foundation, and The Garden (2016-2020) in collaboration with ARoS. Latest publications include The Botanical grotesque, 2026, the co-authored book Plantfever – the World on the Windowsill, 2025, and the projects ‘position paper’ Hidden Plant Stories, 2025.

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af Anette Vandsø og Niclas Nørby Jochumsen Hundahl, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

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