Untitled (PF.295, Endive), c. early 1990s 

Virginia Overton: With this picture, this drawing of endive, when I first saw it, I wasn't sure what it was.

Narrator: Artist Virginia Overton. 

Virginia Overton: It felt like it could be a lot of different flowers or fruits or vegetables. It had the possibility to go in a lot of different directions. But the other quality that really fascinated me was the amount of line on the page. So she just drew and drew all of these detailed crinkles and wrinkles of the edges of the vegetable. And I wondered if you stretched that line out, how long would it be?

Because it does feel, in a way, like one continuous line almost, like her woven hanging sculptures. Those are made of one long piece of wire, and this drawing feels like that. It's just on a single plane, a flat piece of paper.

I think the fact that she was a gardener is a very telling part of her practice. She was interested in the organic and interested in the natural world, and ways in which she could investigate it, transform it, change it into art. It was a very active process. I mean, as gardening is when you're actually growing things, her art practice was very much like a form of that.