Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2025 Botanical Artists in Residence
OSGF
The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is pleased to announce that 6 artists have been selected for the 2025 Botanical Artist in Residence (BAiR) program, taking place over two sessions during the year ahead.
Artists selected for the Oak Spring Garden Foundation’s BAiR program receive a $1,000 individual grant and devote their time at Oak Spring to working on their botanical art, either using material from the formal garden at Oak Spring or from the broader 700-acre Oak Spring landscape. Our hope is that they may also draw inspiration from the Oak Spring Garden Library’s collection. Artists live on-site in nicely appointed shared housing with a studio in close proximity. At the culmination of the residency, each artist has the option to sell one completed work for $1,000 to Oak Spring, and the finished piece will be accessioned into the Oak Spring Garden Library as a contribution to the developing Oak Spring Florilegium.
This residency program is designed to support artists who are practitioners of botanical illustration – which sits at a unique intersection of art and science and is well represented in the Oak Spring Garden Library collection.
To learn more about each of the artists and their work, read below.
Session I
Margaret Saylor
Margaret Saylor (she/her) is an artist based in Mount Penn, PA, who works in graphite, watercolor, and egg tempera. She is currently exploring egg tempera as a medium and building a body of work around new-to-her botanical subject matter. You can see more of her work on her website, on Instagram, and on Facebook.
Jee-Yeon Koo
Jee-Yeon Koo (she/her) is a botanical artist and watercolorist based in the Republic of Korea. She is currently the President of the Korean Society of Botanical Illustrators and has been a principal art director for the Korea National Arboretum’s project for illustrating rare and endangered and poisonous Korean plants and others since 2006. You can see her work on Instagram.
Laura Silburn
Laura Silburn (she/her) is botanical artist and tutor living and working in the far South West of the UK, whose recent work has focused on ferns in different stages of the life cycle, with the goal of eventually illustrating a book on ferns. You can her work on Instagram.
Session II
Hyewoo Shin
Hyewoo Shin (she/her) is a botanical illustrator and plant taxonomy scholar based in the United States who has recently been studying native orchids and related fungi in North America as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). She has explored wild areas of Asia, America, and Europe, and while reporting new and unrecorded species, she drew all the botanical illustrations for those papers. You can see her work on her website and on Instagram.
Issy van Zyl
Issy van Zyl (she/her) is a botanical artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She works in the medium of watercolor and focuses mostly on endemic South African plants and the insects they serve. She currently working on her RHS body of work in the theme of Highveld grassland plants. You can see her work on Instagram.
Yoko Harada
Yoko Harada (she/her) is a botanical illustrator based in Tokyo, Japan, working primarily in watercolor on paper. She graduated with distinction from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh diploma course and has grown her botanical illustration practice under the tutelage of two prior OSGF Botanical Artists in Residence, Elaine Searle and Mieko Ishikawa. You can see her work on her website and on Instagram.
Banner image: 2024 Botanical Artist in Residence Alessandro Cândido at Oak Spring. Photograph by Sarah Goolishian.