Each cyanotype is handmade and unique

Plants recreate, again and again and again. Each piece in this group of medium-sized works on paper begins as a cyanotype photogram and is then altered with different techniques, including bleaching, toning, or painting. Plants are present almost everywhere, in scarcity and in abundance. I'm curious about their stories. 

A photogram is a camera-less photographic technique in which objects are placed on light sensitive paper and then exposed to light. These photograms are made with paper coated with cyanotype chemicals over which I place pressed botanicals: poppies, chickweed, chervil, hostas, dill/Anethum, different grasses.  Each plant has its own history. The story of each of these works on paper begins in a plant's history, long before I collect and press it. Location and process inform the final piece; some are made with experimental techniques and multiple exposures. 
 

The desire to shape the natural world has brought increasingly chaotic results. Plants and fungi offer an ancient perspective about collaboration and flexibility. In the Hollow Bones series, I combine flora and mushroom spores with imagery from John Audubon’s Birds of America: Fifty selections with commentaries by Roger Tory Peterson. At first, it felt strange to alter, to disturb, Audubon’s iconic birds. The Passenger Pigeon was my first. Extinct since 1914, it was once the most abundant bird in North America, believed to be numbering around 3 billion. It was a harbinger of the current disturbing reduction of birds, called a “loss of nature” by biologist Kevin Gaston.

Here’s what I did: I covered Audubon’s Passenger Pigeon in black gesso, painting everything but the two joined birds. Once dry, I placed pressed plants on the painted paper, and on top of the plants, I placed foraged mushrooms with their gill-side down. After many hours, the mushrooms released some of the millions of spores contained in their gills; the powdery spores fell and marked the paper with their color and texture. With the marks of mushrooms and plant silhouettes, and separate from their original habitat, the birds emerge transformed. The imagery of each piece is changed, while Roger Tory Peterson’s commentary on the other side remains intact. 

This series depicts planetary bodies and is named for Selene was the Greek goddess of the moon. Each image is made with spores, the tiny reproductive particles made within a mushroom's gills or pores. When ready, and at astonishing speeds, mushrooms use the ballistospore discharge mechanism to release millions (of tons) of powdery spores into the air. The spores fly and float; they sometimes travel the world in rain clouds to every level of earth’s atmosphere where they may ride currents and become part of an ecosystem, including a forest's rain feedback loop.  Sometimes they simply land close to home and sometimes they form imaginary planets.