As the Grass Grows

If you leave the kiddie pool out on the lawn too long, you end up with a circle of yellow grass. The biological process behind this axiom of suburban lawn blight also is responsible for the 32-foot-long photograph that covered the back wall of Rice Gallery in January and February.

The photo depicted a row of receding brick columns, but the architectural image was oddly green and . . . fuzzy. As you moved closer, you realized that the surface was composed of different shades of grass.

Grass produces chlorophyll in response to light. It turns deep green in bright light, and without light, it becomes pale yellow, colored by light independent pigments. British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey exploit the light sensitive properties of grass in their art, employing swaths of grass in the same way other artists use photographic paper.

Ackroyd and Harvey are art collaborators as well as a married couple. Mutual friends introduced them because, oddly enough, both artists were working with grass. The artists create their pieces by bending nature to their will. They discovered that the lights and darks of a photographic negative will register on growing grass and produce a range of shades between dark green and pale yellow that closely approximate the tonal ranges of black-and-white photographs.

“Green brick, green back” was the title of their recent two-piece installation at Rice Gallery. The “green brick” portion of the title was a slightly disorienting image of the courtyard of Sewall Hall transposed large-scale inside the building. A smaller work on a side wall was the “greenback” referred to in the title—an image of a dollar bill, rendered with amazing clarity. The two hung on the walls like small vertical lawns.

To create the works, Ackroyd and Harvey covered the walls with plastic and stretched a layer of burlap fabric over the plastic. They then spread the burlap with a slurry of clay and pressed grass seeds into the mixture. Photographic negatives were projected onto the germinating surfaces—12 hours a day for eight days. Where the brightest light struck, the grass became greener; where there was less light, the grass grew a lighter green. No light resulted in pale yellow. The registration of the image had to be adjusted as the grass blades grew upwards, or the image would have become blurred.

The works had the slightly hazy feeling of 19th-century photographs. The grass was fine and feathery rye grass, not the thick, spiky St. Augustine most Houstonians are familiar with, and its lush, velvety denseness captured and held the images with amazing presence and depth.

A lot of artists make work that is ephemeral, and you would think grass would be one of the most transient materials possible, but there is yet another twist to the artists’ work. Under the right conditions, these works can last from months to years. The grass they use—known as “stay-green” and marketed as So-Green—is a naturally occurring mutation that retains its chlorophyll even after it dies. The lights in the gallery were kept low because, like any vegetable pigment, chlorophyll will eventually fade in strong light.

The artists have received numerous grants for their work and for their collaborative projects with scientists at the Institute for Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth, Wales, where stay-green was discovered in 1969. The scientists, in turn, are benefiting from the artists’ explorations into the light sensitivity of grass, using it as a noninvasive way to analyze the aging of plant cells. Through this work, Ackroyd and Harvey are collaborating on a symbiosis between art and science—as well as giving us a new appreciation for that big patch of yellow grass in the backyard.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer