Leela Keshav


  Projects

      Archive of Stolen Seeds
      Birdscript
      Field Guide to the Botanical Imaginary
      Hauntings from the Sixth Extinction
      Stone Asemics  
      Seed Storytellers
      The Specimenisation of Sequoia
      The Seven Circles of Manoomin
      To Find a Waiting Fossil    
      Unmapping Landscape       

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©2025 Leela Keshav












Hauntings from the Sixth Extinction

This cyanotype series inscribes herbarium sheets of extinct or extinct-in-the-wild plants archived at Kew, which has the largest herbarium in the world. 

What does it mean to preserve dried fragments of plants who no longer grow outside of tightly controlled environments like botanical gardens? What stories live on in these sheets, and what stories are irrevocable? 

The series evokes these plants’ archival hauntings, alluded to by the ghostly shadows drawn in chalk over the prints. The cyanotype acts as an inversion of the herbarium sheet, representing a plant that has been collected, dried, flattened, imaged, re-imaged and transferred via sunlight onto the final print.