Michele Fletcher: Fooling Linnaeus takes its title from the father of modern taxonomy to examine painting as a space where systems of order begin to falter. Rather than illustrating nature, Fletcher's invented botanic abstractions emerge from memory, sensation, and intuitive process — paint pushed and reworked until forms suggest dense flora and plant systems without ever fully settling into rooted images. Brushstrokes branch and proliferate; petals, tendrils, and seedpods surface and dissolve. Drawing on a lineage from Turner and Whistler to Hilma af Klint and Joan Mitchell, Fletcher treats the studio as a site of cultivation where control is bound by unpredictability and forms emerge through the balance of intention and fortuity.
