May - 2025 Herbary Tools
Building on Metabolism, Alma’s 2024 project Progressing received financial support from the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media to document and share her artistic process through video, photography, and an updated web platform
Key components included the creation of handmade brushes from recycled natural materials, a collaboration with the botanist Sandro Bogdanović to present the brushes alongside plants in herbarium form, and the dissemination of content across digital platforms.
What happens when the brush breaks mid-stroke and becomes part of the painting? When driftwood dictates the direction of a mark? When the tool’s agenda overrides the artist’s intention? Croatian artist Alma Čače’s practice investigates these moments where material intelligence challenges human control, revealing painting as a genuinely collaborative act between artist and non-human agents.
Working exclusively with handmade brushes crafted from materials foraged along the Croatian coastline — driftwood, dried plants, weathered rope — Čače surrenders traditional notions of artistic mastery. Her tools are unreliable collaborators: they shed, break, and embed themselves into the work without permission. Rather than fighting this material rebellion, she has learned to negotiate with it.
While rooted in painting’s materiality, this practice extends far beyond traditional process art. Čače’s work asks urgent questions: Who decides when a mark is finished? What happens when we acknowledge materials as creative partners rather than passive media? How might recognizing non-human agency transform not just art-making but our relationship with the more-than-human world?