The Art of Survival
A Conversation on Conservation
Photo by Matt Chung, courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.
The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens unveiled The Orchid Show 2025: Rebecca Louise Law and is on view through December 7, 2025 at the downtown Sarasota campus.
Internationally acclaimed for her suspended floral installations, British artist Rebecca Louise Law transforms the Richard and Ellen Sandor Museum of Botany & the Arts into an ethereal sanctuary of preserved blooms, leaves, and light.
Her newest installation—crafted with materials of her own collection and those gathered from Selby Gardens’ landscapes—invites visitors to experience the poetry of preservation and the quiet resilience of the natural world. We sat down with Law to explore her creative vision, her fascination with transformation and survival, and the beauty found in the fragile balance between humanity and nature.
Law’s installation at Selby Gardens explores the theme of survival, which is relevant to the institution and its collections in several ways.
In Tampa Bay METRO’s interview, hear first hand, her take on it all.
METRO: What inspired your focus on the theme of survival for your Selby Gardens installation?
Rebecca Louise Law: Looking at epiphytes at Marie Selby Gardens and the purpose of a flower led me to the title ‘Survival.’ The flower exists for the plant to survive. I have collected and preserved 2 million flowers over the past 20 years. Half of this collection will be exhibited in this installation. The whole artwork is an example of preservation and survival.
METRO: How does adding flowers from Selby Gardens to your archive shape the legacy of your work?
RLL: The imprint of a place is incredibly valuable to my work – the plant life and the people of a place. The flowers collected from Marie Selby campuses were entwined with wire by the local community in Sarasota. My archive is a herbarium that travels; examples of flora have been preserved from all over the world. The plant varieties are recorded and imbedded into the work with copper wire. It is all legacy: the plants and the people.
METRO: What do you hope visitors feel or experience as they move through this installation?
RLL: A connection to nature and a chance to observe all the earth provides. To have gratitude for what we have and to energise the viewer to look after what we have.
METRO: How do your other artistic practices influence your large-scale floral installations?
RLL: My supporting works help me explore nature in more detail. I love delving deep into botany and natural science through sculpture, painting, drawing, reading and writing.
METRO: What role can art play in encouraging people to connect with and protect the natural world?
RLL: Art is a way of communicating. Art can capture a moment in time. Art can allow a viewer to ‘muse.’ Art can inspire, educate, upset, disgust, drain and energise. We react to our physical world. I believe to care and connect to this earth, we need time to notice its beauty and awe. I want art to energise viewers to care for the natural world by giving them a place to connect to nature without distraction. M
Written by Evan Louis Parag
Feature Photography: detail from Rebecca Louise Law’s installation Life in Death, 2017. Photo by Charles Emerson, courtesy of Shirley Sherwood Gallery, Kew.
