Two Internet Obsessions, One New Book: Stephen Eichhorn’s Cats & Plants

What started as a pet project (no pun intended) collaging cats with plants has blossomed into a full-blown book, appropriately titled Cats & Plants, from the Chicago-based artist Stephen Eichhorn and Strange Plants publisher Zioxla. The tome promises “Calicos and cactuses, Siamese and succulents, and so much more.” Eichhorn is well-known for his feline-and-flora collages, cutting around found images in books and magazines with an X-Acto blade to achieve a layered effect the artist likens to drawing and sculpture. Plants become architectural elements and kittens…well, they remain kittens, but also art. The release for the book proposes Eichhorn’s “Shell Cat” series, in which the gleaming eyes of cats peek out from different shells, as something of a meditation on feline identity — “perhaps [they are] attempting to be less adorable, more austere.”

If the work sounds a bit surface-level, maybe you’ve just been spending too much time considering the inner life of Ivanka Trump and not enough on the inner lives of cats. At 152 pages, this book will give you the much-needed space in which to do just that. Designed by Barcelona creative studio Affaire to evoke “vintage cat sourcebooks,” Cats & Plants is a thrilling testament to the staying power of, uh, pussy. Bonus: for each book or print sold on the publishing house’s website, a can of cat food will be donated to a non-profit organization that saves cats from shelters. Now there’s a pet project we can get behind.

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