Anne Geene — Eternal Herbarium

Anne Geene (NL, 1983) is a visual artist based in The Hague. As a sensitive observer of nature, she takes photographs and collects natural findings. Driven by an interest in information and how we deal with the data we create, she investigates, organises, and classifies her findings in ways that reveal new aspects of them. By creating unusual, sometimes absurd categories, she highlights how our systems work — or fail to work. Her work lies at the intersection of objective observation and personal interpretation, focusing on patterns, anomalies, and the urge to catalogue the world around us. [1]↓

Eeuwig Herbarium (Eternal Herbarium) is one project within Geene’s broader Museum of the Plant, a long‑running, fictional “museum” that investigates plants beyond the usual botanical categories. The series is built around the concept of the herbarium as both a historical tool and a visual format: sheets on which plants are collected, dried, and preserved for later study. [2]↓

In Eternal Herbarium, Anne Geene combines a preserved plant specimen with its photographic reproduction within one composition. By aligning them in a single format, she creates a direct comparison between the organic material and its captured image.
While the dried plant gradually fades and deteriorates over time, the colour of the print remains fixed, providing a record of change. The project calls into question the concept of 'What is the original', whether in the context of photography or biology. [3]↓

This places the series between scientific documentation and artistic archiving. On the one hand, the works echo the conventions of botanical herbaria, such as picked specimens, framed presentation, and close observation. On the other hand, they foreground questions about objectivity, representation, and the role of the image in shaping how we understand nature. In doing so, they transfrom the herbarium format into a reflection on preservation, transience, memory, and the limits of cataloguing living matter.