Mandy Bonnell, Tracey Bush, Marisa Culatto,
Jane Joseph, Serena Smith, Carolyn Thompson
16 November – 22 December 2023
‘ … the naturalist, from the habit of observing, sees many things not obvious to all persons …’
John Leonard Knapp: Journal of a Naturalist (1829)
The instinct to discover and record the natural world is a profoundly human one. It is from close observation of nature that we begin to intuit the patterns that govern our universe, to understand its hierarchies and equilibriums.
Collecting Nature draws on the work of six artists who explore a rich tradition that spans Medieval bestiaries, botanicals and herbariums to the collections of 18th and 19th century self-taught amateur naturalists. The exhibition encompasses many mediums including artist’s books, botanical drawings, etchings, photographs, entomology boxes, cutting-edge silk screens and stone-printed lithographs. The artists focus on nature to comment upon history, the passage of time, the fragility of our eco-system.
The show features recent and historic work, including Jane Joseph’s original plant studies for the etching portfolio Seeds and Fruits (2007) – a collaboration with the writer Mel Gooding that celebrates indigenous British plants – and Mandy Bonnell’s Helicopter Flower series which combine pressed botanical specimens with meticulously detailed pencil drawings.
Marisa Culatto’s digital photographs are an evocative expression of nature morte that record collections of flowers and plants she found on individual walks which she set into blocks of ice.
The images speak of the temporal nature of beauty, of photography’s ability to freeze a moment of time and are the subject of Flora: A Frozen English Garden, published by Black Dog Press (October 2023).
Carolyn Thompson’s Last Walk Home (made during a residency for Chrysalis Arts and the North Yorkshire County Records Office in 2020-21), is a series of botanical drawings of the plants indigenous to the area around Ryedale. Over-laid in layers, the finely drawn images (some shaped as wreaths), commemorate the deaths of local men who appealed unsuccessfully against conscription during the First World War.
Serena Smith’s large scale artist’s book Ekphrasis originated in observations of trees growing in a local community arboretum. The book is a ‘meditation on natural and artificial creation, on word and image, and on trace lines of growth and decay.’ (Robert Bolick: Books on Books). Subtle images of ageing bark, depicted in hand-coloured lithographs, are counterpointed with a text that considers an analogous relationship between the pathways of the landscape and the contours of lines drawn on stone.
New prints and 3D multiples by Tracey Bush, published by the Centre of Fine Print Research at UWE, extend an analogue practice of cut paper sculpture by the use of machine. Bush’s work has long focussed on the impact human beings have on the natural environment. Lost Wings of Summer is a requiem for 13 species of British Butterfly which perfectly marries the hand-made with the advantages of modern technology. The work is made as an entomology box that incorporates laser cutting, blind embossing, paper sculpture and letterpress. A large silk screen, Dusking, utilises layers of directional ink to reveal a cloud of 50 moths. At moments the ghostly image vanishes into the deep black of smooth compressed Plike paper, or comes alive, febrile, as light catches its surface.
‘Everything is everywhere’ said the botanist: every waste-land a seed ground. Every pregnant pod and handsome seed-head as assertion, every flower a sexual invitation to generation, each fruit a delicious affirmation.’
Mel Gooding: terrains vagues, Seeds and Fruits (2007)
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