Grass and photographic film have one thing in common: Both are exquisitely sensitive to light. And both, as it turns out, can be used to create works of art.

British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been working with novel strains of grass to create photographic images and unique artworks. Photosynthesis, grass, and other living media have long intrigued the two artists. In 2000, they won a prize awarded by the L'Oreal Art and Science Foundation for their ethereal green and yellow "photograss" image, "Mother and Child."

Figure 7.1: Mother and Child

Their discovery that grass can be a surface for photographic images was accidental. In 1990, they were commissioned to create an organic artwork in an old house in Italy. They decided to grow a coat of grass on the interior walls of the house. One morning they moved a ladder that had been leaning against one of the walls and discovered a faint yellow imprint of rungs in the newly sprouted grass. You may have noticed the same effect after leaving a watering hose or other object on a lawn for a couple of days. Ackroyd and Harvey started experimenting with projecting large black and white negatives onto newly planted grass and were astonished by the subtle detail of the resulting images. Each individual blade of developing grass reacts to the amount of light falling on it. The more light, the more chlorophyll pigment the grass blade will produce. Chlorophyll is the green pigment in most living plants that helps convert sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to carbohydrates. This process, called photosynthesis, is the basis of nearly all food chains on Earth.

Grass under the dark areas of the projected negative, where photosynthesis is subdued, is pale yellow. Under the lighter areas, where plenty of light shines through and photosynthesis is more rigorous, the grass is a deeper green. The grass image itself develops slowly over days as the young blades mature.

There is an ephemeral, delicate quality to these chlorophyll photographs. Once the projected negative is removed the yellow areas start darkening to green. Ackroyd and Harvey wanted their artwork to last a little longer and turned to the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) in Wales for help.

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The scientists at IGER were working on delaying plant death and keeping grass green. When a plant is under stress, the first things to go are the leaves, which lose their chlorophyll, turn yellow and die. It's a survival strategy; rather than lose the roots and stems which leads to certain death, a plant will first jettison the chlorophyll-producing leaves. When the stress is removed, the plant simply grows new leaves. The IGER geneticists discovered the gene in grass responsible for producing an enzyme that degrades chlorophyll and turns a green lawn into a sickly yellow or brown one. Block the expression of the gene and grass stays green even under stress.

IGER created a genetically engineered strain of grass with an altered "green gene." Lawn aficionados Ackroyd and Harvey used this new strain for their Mother and Child photograss image. Even when the grass died, it retained the original level of chlorophyll in each blade and preserved the image. But eventually Mother and Child did fade from oxidation and exposure to light, like an oil painting that loses its bright colors. Artworks, like all objects and living things, are subject to the ravages of time and nature. This loss doesn't distress the artists, who say they are not forsaking the temporary nature of their photosynthesis-created works. "There is beauty in growing as there is also beauty in fading," Heather Ackroyd said in a magazine interview. "It arouses all sorts of emotions and thoughts about time, memory, loss, and, of course, possession."

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