Camila Ospina Gaitán: Unconquered Natures – Tropicalism

Camila Ospina Gaitán: Unconquered Natures – Tropicalism

Hawthornvale Space

Exhibition Runs: 5 April – 17 June 2025

Viewable daily, 7 am – 9 pm, from the street.

Camila Ospina Gaitán’s new commission examines the logic of colonialism through the lens of orchid collection—an 18th- and 19th-century practice in which collectors from the global north were sent to the -West Indies, South America, the Indian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia- to plunder the most exotic and coveted specimens of these delicate flowers. This operation, conceived and executed by men, was justified under the guise of noble intentions—to protect, cultivate, and bring the unknown under scientific scrutiny. It echoed the familiar paternalistic rhetoric of colonial powers, who framed imperial expansion as a civilizing mission, despite its foundation in violence and exploitation. Driven by the forces of capitalism, racialisation, and extractivism, this process not only reshaped landscapes and societies but also reinforced structures of domination that persist to this day.

In this installation, Gaitán transforms the space into a nursery of rare specimens, uprooted from their native soil. These moving sculptures intertwine history, fiction, and science to reflect on the enduring repercussions of colonial resource extraction in her native Colombia. Her works trace the lasting impact of colonialism, exposing the harm inflicted on people, landscapes, and ecosystems while navigating the intricate entanglement of love, care, and violence. Consistent with her previous explorations of the sexualisation and objectification of the female body, this installation extends these inquiries by situating them within a broader colonial framework. Under colonial rule, the female body was subjected to forms of control, commodification, and violence that paralleled the exploitation of land and resources. By drawing these connections, Gaitán’s work not only critiques the extractivist logic of colonialism but also interrogates its enduring presence in contemporary cultural and aesthetic discourse.

Megan Rudden: Response to Unconquered Natures

Light from the Hawthornvale Space of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop pours out onto the street. An exotic tricolour of pink, orange and yellow cuts through the still greyness of late afternoon in Newhaven. Each window contains a different named specimen, three towering flower bodies that shimmy and jitter in their own tropical microclimate. But these sleek petals did not arrive via photosynthesis, instead they were painstakingly cooked, section by section, in a domestic kitchen. Powdered gelatine, thickened into an almost opaque sheet. Droplets of colour bleed out in circular motions, dotting the petals like jam dropped in panna cotta. I imagine biting into the surface and tasting each plastic colour. Delicate aluminium leaves cling on to each side, steel roots unfurl in a desperate search for soil and familiar ground. Through these imitable sculptures, Camila Ospina Gaitán dissects ideas of colonialism within the history of orchid collection. This activity, taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved collectors from the global north excavating species from the West Indies, South America, the Indian Peninsula and Southeast Asia under the guise of scientific exploration and environmental conservation. However, following the logic of colonial expansion, this thinly veiled mission was guided instead by violent, racialised ideas of extraction and domination. Historical context, fiction and scientific information, interweave in Gaitán’s installation to expose the repercussions of this colonial mission on her native Colombia. This work also expands on Gaitán’s previous interrogations concerning the objectification of women. Here she draws a connection between the exploitation of nature and female bodies. I think then of my own body, and how its reproductive parts still bear the names of the male doctors who ‘discovered’ them. But this work does more than simply compare a woman to a flower, these hybrid creatures appear to have agency and demand that the story of how they came to exist be told, in all its incriminating detail. They put themselves on display, offering their bodies as testament to the violence through which they were obtained, the text on each window giving voice to this journey. These writhing orchids, although contained for now, are not passive specimens. They loom over the viewer, threatening release. 

Megan Rudden, 2025

Camila Ospina Gaitán is a Colombian artist. She graduated with merit in Contemporary Art Practice MFA at the University of Edinburgh. She studied Visual Arts at Javeriana University in Bogotá and, in 2016, was awarded the LAP Program scholarship by the Japanese government. She pursued further studies in Nagoya at Nanzan University and in Tokyo at Sophia University. Her projects span various media, including sculpture and installation. Currently, her work focuses on the sexualisation and objectification of female bodies, engaging with diverse historical characterisations and narratives.

Since 2015, she has exhibited in various cities such as Tokyo, Bogotá, Miami, and Edinburgh. In 2022, she was awarded the Radcliffe Trust Award, Creative Scotland funding, and an EU Creatives grant, and she did a three-month residency at Northlands Creative. That year, she also held her first solo show, Thorn in the Flesh, in Edinburgh. At the start of 2023, she participated in a collaborative exhibition in Hamburg with Juan Ricaurte, reviewed in MAP Magazine by Guilherme Vilhena Martins. More recently, in May 2023, she received The Great Britain Sasakawa Award and presented her solo show, Visual Narratives and Pleasure, in Kyoto, Japan. From December 2023 to February 2024, she presented her largest solo exhibition to date, titled An Uncanny Feeling That She Was Being Watched, at the Summerhall Meadows Galleries in Edinburgh, showcasing four years of her work.

You can find out more about her work here.

The Hawthornvale Mentorship Programme supports emerging visual artists who are beginning to establish their practice and require guidance to advance their careers.

The Programme is designed to foster the development of contemporary public art, reaching a wide audience and offering the public an unexpected encounter with thought-provoking artworks in a dynamic setting.

Hawthornvale Space is Conceived as an ongoing programme of temporary public artworks, this programme reaches a broad audience, providing the members of the public with an unexpected encounter with contemporary art.

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