LONDON.- Lyndsey Ingram presents their exhibition, As Chosen By … Part II. This is Kate Friend’s second solo show at the gallery and is the final installment of this series of work.

In these portraits, her ‘sitters’ are flowers or plants, each one selected by a recognisable public figure or creative who is then recast through a plant of their choosing. These ‘sitters’ are chosen by the artist. Friend’s approach to making this series is rigorous: a single flower (in bloom on the day of the shoot) and vessel, chosen by the sitter, is shot in natural light at their home, studio or garden on medium format film. Each photograph is as much a portrait of a place and time as it is a portrait of a person and a flower. The coloured backdrop for each image is selected by Friend, with her choice driven both by the aesthetic of the chosen flower and by a deeper intuitive sense of her sitter’s character. Although her methodology is concise and consistent, the artist’s resulting variety of images is testament to the array of unique personalities included in the project.

The show presents 22 new works (bringing the total number of works in this series to 41) in a standard size edition of five (plus two artist proofs) and a large size edition of three (plus one artist proof). The show will also include a selection of items, specially commissioned by Kate, that relate to the making of her works. This includes handmade white porcelain vases by Karen Downing (Norfolk, UK) artisan free-blown glass vases by Yoko Yamano (Stockholm, Sweden) and black-forged carbon steel scissors by Ikenami Hamano (Tanegashima Island, Japan).

Portraits, As Chosen By ... is a new publication presenting all 41 works from Kate Friend's photographic series of the same title, published in September 2023 by Ridinghouse, with essays by Christopher Woodward and Olivia Laing, available at the gallery and its website.

Sitters include: Anjelica Huston, Sir Paul Smith, Kulapat Yantrasast, Piet Oudolf, Luciano Giubbilei, Ai Weiwei, Claudia Schiffer, Tom Stuart-Smith, Yinka Ilori, Simone Rocha, Tania Compton, Georgie Hopton, Olivia Laing, Sue Stuart-Smith, Jamie Compton, Fernando Caruncho, Amanda Feilding, Ron Finley, Maggi Hambling, Polly Nicholson, Olivia Harrison, Dan Pearson, Penny Rimbaud, Margot Henderson, Duncan Grant, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Bethan Wood, Isabella Tree, Juergen Teller, Charlie McCormick, Molly Goddard, Jeremy Lee, Margaret Howell, Alys Fowler, John Pawson, Amanda Harlech.

Kate Friend was born in the UK. An early desire to explore set in motion a pattern of perpetual solo travel. She lived in Beijing and studied Chinese, before returning to London to begin a career in photography. Over the next decade Kate pursued photography commissions in New York, Iceland, Indonesia and Tokyo. During this time she published her own limited edition arts publication titled MOTHER, which was widely collected and let to various commissions and collaborations with fashion houses, including Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Maison Margiela.

Kate’s current botanical still life work has been written about in The New York Times, Wallpaper*, World of Interiors, The Observer andThe Financial Times. Her Botanical Portraits series was first exhibited at the Garden Museum twice, in 2018 and 2021. Kate’s recent botanical series, As Chosen By, was first shown at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in 2021. The second part of the series will open at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in November 2023.

Kate currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with her partner and their son.

‘There is no end to the associations of these plants, their deep entanglement with human lives. Shot like this, with nothing but a clean backdrop of coloured paper to distract the eye, the intricacy of their forms is almost overwhelming.’ --Olivia Laing, from an essay in Kate Friend As Chosen By, Ridinghouse (2023)

‘As Chosen By is unique as both botany and biography. And that double existence taps into another strength of flowers: what they symbolise for us. Each flower here is a flower, but it is also a "figure" for something unseen.’ --Christopher Woodward, from an essay in Kate Friend As Chosen By (2023)