About The Artist

The Spirit Collection by Brittain Bright explores the fragments of stories and the element of mystery inherent in the medium of photography.  A moment captured by a camera is literally suspended, always between past and future.

The Spirit Collection is a part of the Herbarium collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The flowers are preserved in fluid because they are specimens, which cannot be pressed; they have a great scientific value as well as a ghostly quality.  These images create a loose portrait of that collection through a series of still lifes that blend the visual lushness of the flora with the intense focus and the minute level of inspection allowed by a large format camera.  There is also an important element of history to the collection; the hand-written labels in some of the jars date back to the 1880s.  Science evolves, as does nature. Still these specimens sit in their neat rows of labeled jars, frozen in time, dead but never to decay.