'Equilibrium'

Smartweed has a name that sounds like a weed trying to prove something and it has been doing so successfully since before anyone kept records. Its tiny pink flower spikes are precise and numerous and slightly improbable. Elderflower is the opposite register: flat-topped clusters of cream-white florets, the smell of every English summer afternoon, the ingredient in things that are meant to be delicate.

Together in the Royal Academy’s 1-inch by 2-inch brass rectangle, they make a field study of two plants that grow near each other and have figured out how to occupy the same frame with perfect equilibrium. The brass setting is minimal, clean. It is there to define the edges. What is inside defines everything else.

For the one who finds the overlooked things beautiful — and has always been right to.