Not Your Regular Garden: Around Blooming, Around Reforesting by Doa Oa

“Not Your Regular Garden” hosts Spanish artist Doa Oa and a new iteration of her “Reforestando” project.

2024 marks the last stage of Around Pollinators, the garden intervention that Lucía Loren created in 2022. With Loren’s project in mind, and considering the plants she envisioned for each flower bed, Spanish artist Doa OA takes the idea of the garden to another level, extending its concept to the walls.

In this first edition of Not Your Regular Garden, and as a wink to our indoor project Not Your Regular Wall, Doa OA proposes Around Blooming, Around Reforesting, a work that creates a deep and empathetic connection with flowers and nature, promoting the appreciation of their beauty, awareness of plant diversity, and the historical relationship between humans and plants through pictorial interventions and reforestation projects.

The piece encourages viewers to approach flowers closely for a personal encounter and perhaps see themselves reflected. Getting on the same level as something helps in understanding it better, improving communication and empathy. Getting on the level of flowers is not only a sensory delight for sight and smell but also opens the door to a mystical experience that appreciating beauty provides, slowing down time like observing the present moment.

Through the Reforestando project, the artist promotes plant reintegration to raise awareness about plant diversity, enhance understanding of these beings, preserve accumulated knowledge, and highlight the extensive historical relationship between humans and plants.

The proposed pictorial intervention spans the garden, starting from the building’s facade. It features two images of Echinacea purpurea: one showing the entire flower and the other a macro detail for closer inspection. The intervention extends along a path through the garden’s plant pots, with small interventions highlighting native wild plant species. These scenes encourage closer observation of nature’s forms, cycles, and the diverse nuances of the plant kingdom.

Doa Oa

Doa Oa was born in Sober (Lugo) in 1986. She studied Artistic Photography (EASD Pablo Picasso) and Fine Arts (U.Vigo Pontevedra, Mexico, and Lisbon). With multidisciplinary training, she creates botanical murals, textile installations, audiovisual interventions, photography, and activist botanical illustrations.

She has participated in public art residencies such as Bien Urbain (France), Fazunchar (Portugal), Saladina Fest (Mallorca), Muralfest Kosovo+Void projects (Kosovo), Asalto en Alfamén (Zaragoza), Mulleres extramuros (Spain), Wool (Portugal), Walk and talk (Azores, Portugal), Reversible (Rivas Vaciamadrid), Kaldarte (Galicia), Le non lieu (France), among others.

She received the Injuve Grant for Young Creation in 2014. She participated in exhibitions such as Cultivar incertezas (CGAC, Santiago de Compostela), Emergency on Planet Earth (CCCC Valencia), Veraneantes (MARCO, Vigo), O Bosquexo do mundo (MARCO, Vigo) and Trienal desenha (Lisbon).

Currently, Doa Oa focuses most of her work on the Reforestando project, aiming to symbolically regenerate spaces through pictorial intervention. This initiative helps the plant kingdom reclaim abandoned areas, fostering interspecies interconnectedness and dialogue by highlighting wild plants. From this initial idea, a project of mural paintings in public spaces has developed since 2014, with a format of a mural herbarium spread across the geography, portraying wild plant species with a botanical illustration approach. This connects us with aspects like medicine, food sovereignty, traditions, mysticism, and beauty, emphasizing their significant influence.