Sarah Mayhew Craddock views the beauty of nature captured in art

A trip to the University of Oxford Botanic Garden can be a sobering experience at this time of year, as one wanders among the decaying winter die-back amid a swarming army of bright green shoots busting through the hard ground.

Immersing herself in the garden, visual artist Patrice Moor has spent 18 months as artist in residence at there; making sketches, taking photographs and sometimes taking a few specimens out of the garden and back to her studio in London.

Beautiful, yet not built with beauty in mind, the University of Oxford Botanic Garden was founded in 1621, as a physic garden growing plants for medicinal research, and is one of the oldest scientific gardens in the world.

Today, the garden contains more than 8,000 plant species within its modest 1.8 hectares of grounds, making it one of the most diverse yet compact collections of plants in the world.

Moor came to her Oxford post after a period of residence at the Royal College of Physicians in London where, surrounded by buildings, her oeuvre took a turn from being focused on the cranial to the botanical, she explains, “I was asked by the Royal College of Physicians to inspire myself from the medicinal garden to produce some works. This made me realise how integral plants were to my areas of interests: life, decay and death.”

In Oxford, she felt overwhelmed by the concentrated collections and the possibilities that might open up before her eyes with the changing seasons.

Moor’s artistic career was launched more by chance than design. Just as she was about to start an MA in law, she found out she was pregnant with twins.

After the twins were born, she found herself immortalising the various, rapidly changing phases of her babies’ lives at first in watercolour and then later in oil, her preferred medium.

A familial lifecycle of her own making had begun and she was captivated by it; though not from an introspective or macabre perspective, but from the cool and collected humanist perspective of memento mori and with a celebratory chime that transcends her paintings.

“My work is realistic, but I find reality extraordinary. By looking at something closely and carefully, and being faithful to what you have in front of you, often the object, the plant, evolves as if by alchemy. These are extremely exciting moment of surprises and a real joy.”

Moor is an artist who identifies life, decay and delight in everything. Being in a garden makes her subject matter all the more interesting, as there is a potent, indomitable sense of transience as the cycle of life surrounds you in a garden.

“After my residency at the Royal College of Physicians, where I inspired myself from the medicinal garden to produce some works, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to immerse myself further in the subject of plants.

“My subject is not morbid; there is an emphasis towards life holding death in mind and the cycle of life.”

Highlighting the diversity and fragility of living things, as well as the transience of plants and their lifecycles, the themes of life, death and decay underpin Moor’s 15 exp-ertly executed oil paintings on display in the city’s Botanic Garden until May 4. These paintings have been a labour of love, a dedicated mark of respect for life and the powers of nat-ure. Moor’s paintings in Nature Morte take a great deal of time to create, she works by building up thin layers of paint to create a succulent, delicate, translucent vegetal aesthetic. The sunflower painting in this exhibition, for example, took four months to complete and the have taken several weeks each.

“I am instinctive in my approach and tend not to plan,” she explains. “My approach is purposefully not intellectual or cerebral. I don’t think you choose your subject; the subject chooses you.”

The half-Dutch and half-Luxem-bourger London-based artist possesses a sense of respect and a drive for understanding the world from an holistic perspective that would have served her well in a career in law.

However, having seen the work she is exhibiting in Nature Morte, I feel certain Moor made the right career choice.

Patrice Moor: Nature Morte
University of Oxford Botanic Garden
Until May 4
Visit botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk and patricemoor.co.uk