A Language of Seeds is a series of photographs celebrating the artist Léonie Hampton's vegetable garden, family and friends responding to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM)’s botany collection.

Léonie Hampton is from the artist collective Still Moving, her lens captures both the beauty of the natural world while attending to the urgent climate crisis through the tender relationships she creates between human hand, body and mouth, and the food she grows. Children feature in these photographs: their presence reminding us that they are both witnessing and inheriting this man-made climate emergency.

Léonie visited RAMM’s varied botany collections in store where she was introduced to a range of specimens including those from local enthusiasts such as William D’Urban, RAMM’s first curator, and William Keble Martin, best known for his book The Concise British Flora in Colour. 

Hampton’s photographs provide a rich context to consider our place in this fragile world and our need to respect, nurture and tread lightly within it.

Read about the exhibition in The Guardian

Léonie Hampton is also an artist-in-residence at King’s College London. Working in collaboration with Dr Jane Catford, Reader in Ecology, Léonie is developing a project exploring perceptions of human and plant “nativeness” to perceive ourselves in relation to biodiversity and climate crises. ‘Parable of the sowers' is an interactive artwork in A Language of Seeds responding to invasive plant species. This is the first artistic response to Jane's research - read more.

Commissioned by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) and curated by Lara Goodband, Contemporary Art Curator & Programmer RAMM.

Join us for the Private View on Friday 13 January, 5-7pm including 'Léonie Hampton and Lara Goodband in Conversation' at 6pm - view the invitation

Associated programme:

13 January, 6-7: Léonie Hampton and Lara Goodband in conversation
28 January, 10-3: Creative Writing Workshop with Louisa Adjoa Parker
13 February - 20 March, 10.30-12: Art Talk Serieswith art historian John Francis

18 February, 10-5: Family Woodworking Workshop with The Somerset Bodgers
4 March: Climate Conversations & Honiton Seed Swap. Guest speakers: artist Léonie Hampton, Catherine Causley - Climate Officer EDDC and award-winning garden designer Lulu Urquhart

Image ©  Léonie Hampton, A Language of Seeds, 2021, commissioned by Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council, 2020-1