Jacques Nimki’s practice involves the use of wild plants to communicate ideas about environmental and cultural issues. He adapts archaic processes more commonly associated with the Victorian era of exploration and collection, analysing urban plant life, like a botanist, but in a deliberately unscientific way.

For this exhibition, Nimki created Florilegium, an indoor meadow of the kind of plants that grow in the neglected and hidden areas of Birmingham’s Eastside district. The artist researched and catalogued these specimens and produced a large field in Ikon Eastside – a disused factory that Ikon occupied. The planned rejuvenation of Eastside provided the focus for this project. Once the city’s industrial heartland, it is now the home of empty buildings and dilapidated warehouses. Florilegium inviteed the viewer to consider that which is often overlooked and widely regarded as worthless or insignificant.

With grateful thanks to Advantage West Midlands, Birmingham City Council, Business Link and the European Regional Development fund for supporting Ikon’s Eastside exhibition space and Florilegium by Jacques Nimki.

In May 2007, a group of pupils from St. Barnabas Primary School in Erdington visited Ikon’s Eastside space as it was being prepared for the installation.