tiny but wondrous...

A quick post tonight to share this amazing gif I posted on my tumblr site: From one small seed

Explosive pods launch seeds up to 20ft (via cravelandscape)

For much more seed and plant related inspiration go visit this tumblr!

2012 winding down ... but not the studio!

Yesterday I was over at Percolator Gallery in Paddington, Brisbane, working in my studio downstairs when I had a visual communication idea to try out in the gallery windows now the year's exhibition program has just come to an end.  In Melbourne during the mid 90's I had a shop-front studio, in the creative hub of Fitzroy / Collingwood, where I constantly made the most of the lovely old shopfront windows for such purposes.

It took time and ideas to do that well back then ... so I was keen to see what could be done here having discussed the possibilities with artist Helena Lloyd, who is also the Gallery owner. I was inspired by the thought of re-using photocopied posters on seeds I'd done for a Sustainability Event in 2011, as a kind of wall-paper. 

When I return to the studio today I will see if the posters are successfully staying up in the heat... that might determine a change of plan... so we'll see. I took photos at dusk and then when it was completely dark last night.

The window easily lends itself to a little drama!

My studio is at the back down the left. The Gallery runs as a for-hire space and thus has a changing panorama of exhibitions which run for a week, or sometimes two weeks at a time. Its wonderfully located in a particularly scenic part of Brisbane on one of the ridges overlooking the city. Surrounded by cafes and small boutique-type stores it has a lovely ambience and neighbourly feel.

The wallpaper idea worked quite well as a backdrop to the paintings... two seascapes on the right which Helena painted when at Cuchiemudloo Island in Moreton Bay which fringes Brisbane, and an oval painting of Brachychiton seed pods I painted in 2010.

The quotes which run down the middle of the window communicate a clear message for anyone who strolls by and wishes to take a closer look!

Night time the window is stark and very readable from up close.

The entrance to the right shows a glimpse of a long narrow work I hung there last night.

I will be having a show here at the end of January, running for two weeks, which I am starting to focus more on now, adding to work completed already this year.

There is quite a bit of reading if anyone is curious and takes the time!

Last time I used these posters I had a far bigger wall to work with.

Claudia, a student of mine in 2010, standing before of a presentation at a Brisbane Sustainability Day  event I did in 2011... using these same A3 posters.

Black and white photo-copying was the perfect vehicle for an effective 'wallpaper' of seed messages and drawings. I've enjoyed taking my journals to the copiers and playing with the positive /negative feature on the self-serve machines. Some imagery becomes really strong or curiously more sensitive when altered in this way. It certainly makes for quite an interesting 'homage' to the seed!

Watch this space for news of the exhibition at the tail end of January!
bye for now,
S 

Rainforest fruits, seed pods and findings from the Wet Tropics of North Queensland

This what I brought back from Cairns in far north Qld last week. I found a large platter I serve fruit on and filled the tray completely with this abundance of collected items... from the blue quandongs flicked up off the ground at the Cairns Botanic Gardens to black bean seeds pods from the Daintree River Ferry area.

  

My imagination is well and truly fired up by all that I saw up north. These are destined for the studio... some of them Ive already taken time to draw...

I'm due to return north for a month from September 18th to undertake a 4 week residency with an exhibition following. Stay tuned on  this and read more at the website, on  my blogs or Facebook page... all links are in the right sidebar! 

For now I am gearing up to run workshops and a course, paint and invite the public to view the work at my studio...all part of a program to see that this next phase of work is communicated and funded. 

Email me here if you wish to have this program sent to you!  When it gets hugely busy one does find it difficult to find enough time in keep posting on blogs and so on.... but its wonderful to share the stories and hear from others so I will do my best!

       Best wishes all!

                         Sophie

A week in the Wet Tropics region of Northern QLD

So much to share here but not much time with only 24 hours left up in Cairns before I head back to Brisbane after a week getting acquainted with the area and the place where I will do a residency in September/October.... Tanks Arts Centre and Cairns Botanic Gardens. I wrote a couple of posts on this trip at the other two blogs... one about visiting the World Heritage Site at the Daintree National Park...

Mossman River at the Mossman Gorge

The other post about my new journal and drawings of pods and rainforest fruits I've been collecting.

the new journal

Click those links to go see the images.
   Back home soon!
      Sophie

City of Seeds by Daniel Mason at Lapham's Quarter

I found this wonderful essay 'City of Seeds" by Daniel Mason published just yesterday on-line at Lapham's Quarterley - its was available to share and you can subscribe to their journal which looks very interesting I must say!

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

—John Berger, 1987

The City2010: Fall

View Contents / Buy Issue

Early last summer I found myself in negotiation with my landlady over the loquat tree outside our bedroom window. According to our neighbor, the tree, which rises from a six-inch gap between the wall and the driveway, was imperiling cars with its fruit and power lines with its branches. My landlady wanted to cut it down. I didn’t. The tree wraps the entire northwest corner of the apartment in a dark green canopy, transforming the bedroom into a kind of glassed-in treehouse from which we can look in upon bird’s-nests and conferences of squirrels with the kind of intimacy reserved for a nature documentary. In the late spring, we can reach out and pick its fruit.

Of course, my neighbor’s contention was understandable. No one had planted the loquat. It was an escapee from another garden, strictly speaking a “weed,” and a big one at that. Left unchecked, its roots would buckle the driveway, its limbs burst the windows. Already, in high winds, the branches screeched menacingly across the glass. In the dusty cracks between the concrete, seedlings would germinate, grow.

Whether or not my neighbor had such dramatic images in mind, I don’t know. But the struggle between city and nature is an old conceit. One has but to look to the oaks growing on Caspar David Friedrich’s ruined monasteries or the grass that “o’erspreads” the fallen city of Browning’s “Love Among the Ruins” to see how plants have classically been understood as the definition of the city’s demise. When the great fifth-century Chinese poet Bao Zhao wrote with grief of the fallen city of Guangling, he titled his famous Fu, or rhapsody, the “Wu-cheng,” words often translated in anthologies as “ruined city” but which literally means one that is “overgrown.”

“Wet moss clings to the wells/Wild vines entangle the path.” Indeed, looking out from our window, past the tree, it was not hard to see a similar process at work. There were clovers in the driveway and a deodar seedling sprouting on the asphalt rooftop of the carport. There was a tree-of-heaven emerging from the lightless depths beneath another neighbor’s house. And yellow bursts of mustard on the sidewalk, and tangles of pink filaree, and purple cheeseweed. And dandelions. Dandelions, everywhere.

Yet this wasn’t the simple fact of nature’s return. There are no loquats in the native woods a mile away; they are indigenous to southeastern China. There is no deodar cedar (from Kashmir), no tree-of-heaven (from northeastern China and Taiwan), no native cheeseweed or filaree. What was blooming outside was not some sort of natural reclamation. But neither was it the deliberate work of man. It was something different, unique to the city, bound to its inhabitants and, the more I realized, inextricably tied to its fate.

Fourteen hundred years after Bao Zhao’s eulogy for Guangling, the English physician Richard Deakin looked out upon the ruins of another city and also found flowers. But what for the Chinese poet had been a source of grief, for Deakin was a moment of misty nostalgia. Such plants, he wrote, “form a link in the memory and teach us hopeful and soothing lessons amid the sadness of bygone ages.” He even berated the city restorers for destroying the “solitary lesson which so magnificent a ruin is calculated to make upon the mind.”

The occasion for Deakin’s meditations was the 1855 publication of his Flora of the Coliseum of Rome. In cataloging the “most graceful and lovely objects”—420 species of them—found upon the ruins, the author of British Ferns and Their Allies was joining a tradition of urban botany then two-and-a-half centuries old. Wall rue, sea lavender, and pellitory of the wall had been mentioned in John Gerard’s 1597 Herball as growing in the “corners of church buildings” and “among rubbish and other stony places.” Surveys of urban plants had been published for London in 1632 and Paris in 1635. In the 1668Flora of England, John Ray, the great English naturalist, noted Sisymbrium, then called wild mustard of Naples, growing on the remains of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, two years after the city burned in the Great Fire. At least two other botanists had been to the Colosseum before Deakin stared up at its walls. There were rubble floras of Palestine and Algiers, and soon to be one of the Palais d’Orsay, destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871.

Like most of these works, Deakin’s Flora addressed the medicinal qualities of the plants he found: many early botanists were physicians seeking to expand their pharmacopoeias. And yet, by looking for plants in debris, Deakin, like Gerard and Ray, seemed to recognize the central, strange observation that lies beneath the contemporary study of urban botany: the flora of the city is essentially a flora of the city’s destruction. Unlike the managed green of parks and gardens, which only grow in pockets of protected isolation, the wild plants of the city—known as ruderal, after the Latin rudus for ruins or rubble—needthe cracks: the pavement split, the palace abandoned. The fabric of the city as well as the fabric’s tear. Most, like my loquat, have failed to become established in nearby forests; they thrive only where the land has been violently disturbed.

It is not surprising, then, that the great modern advances in the study of the flora of the city were made in cities destroyed during World War II, nor that its center of study was Germany. While Ray found Naples mustard on the burnt remains of St. Paul’s, in Berlin it was another invader, Jerusalem oak goosefoot, that found the bombed environment of that city so favorable as to be ubiquitous within a year. The goosefoot was later accompanied by others, like the tree-of-heaven—the Asian native that also grew in Brooklyn—and the giant goldenrod, so American as to be the state flower of both Kentucky and Nebraska.

In the spaces opened up by the bombing, German botanists found a new science, a “tremendous natural experiment,” in the words of one observer, “which with respect to its size, must be compared to the populating of new habitats created by volcanic activity.” Urban planners spoke of “New Life from Ruins,” a “green veil,” a cure for the “psychosis of rubble of narrow-minded people.” Green space was seen as a way to separate from the past, a fresh start, although, somewhat ironically, such programs—the clearing of tenements, the creation of organic urbanism—had themselves been part of the Nazi city order. Indeed, even the language of postwar urban planning remained haunted by the very ideology it was trying to transcend. The German word for “new habitats” cited above is Lebensraum.

Just as German botanists spread over the rubble mountains of their cities, in England, too, war afforded observations previously impossible. In his April 24, 1943, Nature paper “The Flora of Bombed Areas” Professor Edward Salisbury of Kew Gardens found in the bomb sites perfect laboratories for the study of plant dispersal. But unlike the German proclamations of rebirth, Salisbury had little time for such indulgences. Perhaps it was because the war wasn’t yet over. Or perhaps he found the metaphor obvious enough. Instead, Salisbury’s paper was, emphatically, about how plants spread: elder bush by bird droppings, common groundsel on pedestrian’s boots, oats and wheat and clover in the feed bags of horses. In other cases, they were already there, waiting for the opportunity to bloom. Salisbury attributed the commonness of tomato plants directly to man’s actions, the seeds perhaps having fallen out of a grocer’s cart or a worker’s lunch, now liberated by the absence of the pavement that previously prevented their growth.

But it was wind dispersal to which Salisbury devoted his most loving attention. Fascinated by the mechanisms of seed flight, he described in detail the “silky parachute” of coltsfoot seed and the seventy long hairs of the rosebay willowherb, which open out in dry air but close when the air is moist to form “a beautiful and most efficient dispersal by air currents…brought into action under conditions most favorable to the carriage of the seeds.”

And such carriage! With other botanists he spread paper beneath each plant and counted:

Rosebay willowherb: 80,000 seeds
Common groundsel: 1,100 seeds
Oxford ragwort: 15,000-20,000 seeds
Sticky groundsel: 6,000-86,000 seeds
Coltsfoot: 6,000-9,000 seeds
Canadian fleabane: 120,000-233,000 seeds

It is hard not to see in these numbers some inversion of the casualty lists, a promise of extraordinary fecundity. The image of plant seeds rising in the convection currents that formed over the bare, hot stretches of rubble…drifting slowly…falling slowly—the willowherb, Salisbury calculated, takes over a minute to fall twenty feet—all conjure the air above London as filled with a virtual flora, colonizing the airspace through which two years before theLuftwaffe flew.

This is but my reading. Salisbury’s single swerve from objectivity is the word “beautiful,” and it is quickly followed by more figures. But the appeal of Salisbury’s paper cannot be explained by its science alone. The Times of London sent a reporter to one of his lectures; the story ran at the top of the second page. And at the end of the war, R. S. R. Fitter, in his best-sellingLondon’s Natural History, drew upon Salisbury’s work, invoking nature’s special compensations: the horse chestnut that rebloomed after being stripped by a bomb blast, the thrushes that sang through the raids.

I still feel comfort reading of this expression of resilience, and the popularity of the Natural History suggests that postwar Londoners felt something of the same. And yet, paradoxically, for the city to be reborn, the plants that heralded this regeneration would have to be destroyed. Within a few years, the London grounds upon which the willowherb appeared would be paved over. In Berlin, a few civic movements to preserve wild green spaces created by the bombing eventually capitulated to park or building developers. And even in those corners of the ruined cities that remained untouched for years, these first hopeful species would soon be replaced by other, larger, sturdier forms.

Or perhaps there is no paradox. Such replacement—“succession,” to use the botanical term—is as old as our first myths. Man does not emerge from nothingness; we need a greener stage. Between Adam and the void, there is a garden.

It is through studies like Salisbury’s that our understanding of the city as an ecosystem has been elucidated. Cities are hotter, more overcast, and drier than the surrounding countryside. There is more particulate matter in the air and less sunlight. Trees are stunted, and those in cities where the once dirty air has been cleaned often exhibit an “urban” silhouette: a diminished trunk with thick leading branches, which shot out once the air was clean.

There is less wind generally, but it is often more severe locally, with wind tunneling, and strange sheering forces and violent eddies. There is a similarity between North American prairies and certain patches of urban wasteland, both characterized by soil disturbance by burrowing mammals—prairie dogs, us—and strong gusts of wind.

The soil of the city, though highly variable, is in general compact (from foot traffic and heavy vehicle vibration), alkaline (because of calcium leeched from mortar and cement), and nutrient poor (with hotspots of rich organic waste). Like the air, it is polluted, a factor which affects the flora both directly, as well as through pollution’s effect on symbiotic organisms—for example, by killing insects on which the plant relies for pollination. Extreme chemical variation leads to particularly “urban” niches: heavy application of de-icing salt has prompted the inland march of species of alkaligrass and saltbush, typically found by the sea. The bases of certain neighborhood trees bear a distinct “canine zone” of velvety Prasiola algae and nitrogen-loving mosses.

With constant influx of people and material from all over the world, the city exists under constant inoculation-pressure from foreign species, like Ray’s mustard of Naples and the Jerusalem goosefoot of Berlin. Such flora betrays human behavior intimately: we eat tomato sandwiches, set out birdseed, grow wildflowers from foreign climes. We wear wool sweaters: many nineteenth-century botanical invaders of England came burrowed in wool scrap, a particularly effective form of transportation, as anyone who has worn socks through a grass field knows.

The result is a flora that is species rich. There may be fewer total plants in the city, but there are many more kinds. Niches abound: Deakin found cliff-lovingSedum in the nooks of the Colosseum walls. There is even evidence that the particular demands of a city can drive the evolution of new species (though the boundaries between plant “species” versus “varieties” is often opaque). Certain taxa of dandelion are found only on man-made sites, suggesting that they have evolved over a few hundred years to fit the particular requirements of the city. The London Plane has proved to be so well adapted to urban demands—it is tolerant of pollution, root compaction, and pruning saws—that it is found throughout the world’s cities. And only throughout the world’s cities. Most likely a hybrid of American and Oriental sycamores, it has no native habitat but the street.

The classic ecological conception of succession holds that disturbed land passes through several stages: it is cleared, plants enter, grow, compete, and replace each other, until at last the flora stabilizes. But for the most part, urban flora doesn’t stabilize. Plants enter and grow, but there is rarely a chance to progress beyond this: they are weeded, or paved over, or bombed, and the process begins again. In many ways it reflects the very dynamism of the human city, the constant influx, renewal, and decline, the resilience of the whole despite the death of the parts. In the 1935 study in which he coined the word “ecosystem,” A. G. Tansley refers to Lucretius, whose cosmology of streaming, swerving atoms presents a world always in flux:

Nor need you wonder, while the seeds are all
In constant motion, that the universe
Seems still at rest

As Edward Salisbury wrote, “Some of the seeds, like the spores of the ferns, are so small as to behave like dust particles.” It is almost as if he were channeling Lucretius, too.

In John Hersey’s New Yorker report “Hiroshima,” Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a personnel clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, having spent nearly a month in the hospital, returned to her city for the first time in almost a month. The destruction shocked her, but what particularly “gave her the creeps” was how, “Over everything…was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones…Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt. It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.”

In October of 1945, scarcely two months after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Biological Science Division of the Special Committee for Atomic Bomb Casualty Investigation and Research conducted the first of several surveys of the effects of the bomb on plant and animal life. The Science Council’s report echoed that of Toshiko Sasaki. Stimulated in part by a typhoon that struck the city on September 17, the ashen landscape was covered with pumpkin and morning glory, radish, mustard, fleabane, purslane. Like Ray’s mustard of Naples, their names betrayed their foreign origin: Erigeron canadensis, Veronica persica, Phytolacca americana. New tree growth was seen everywhere. Many trees, burned on one side, continued to grow on the other, and even those trees that seemed to have been completely incinerated began to put out buds from charred trunks and underground roots and stalks. Today over a hundred such trees remain, the most numerous of which are camphor trees, while the closest to the hypocenter was a weeping willow, only 370 meters away. I have read that you can ask any child about such a tree, and they will point the way.

Reading Toshiko Sasaki’s account, it is not hard to see the return of such flora as a miracle, beautiful but, like any miracle, also terrifyingly strange. It suggests the parallel existence of a hidden world, fully formed, simply awaiting the opportunity for expression. If the garden is essential to our conception of human life, it is the seed in which the garden is hidden. “The Lord God made the earth and the heavens,” reads the King James Bible, “and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb before it grew.” It is as if the seed were the first void, that impossible suggestion that something can appear from nothing. When Edward Salisbury wrote of the eighty thousand willowherb seeds, he likely knew that most would not germinate straight away. Rather, they would lodge in microscopic nooks and crannies, some to be eaten or crushed, others to be paved over, but most, simply, to wait. A square meter of urban soil can contain tens of thousands of seeds persisting in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be woken from their slumber. After the fire brigades rescued the London Natural History Museum from German incendiaries,Albizia silk-tree seeds bloomed on their herbarium sheets, liberated from two hundred years of dormancy by the precise combination of flame and water.

All of which suggests, I think, another category of urban flora, beyond the managed gardens and the wild invaders of our roads. It is a hidden, potential flora, an idea of a forest, not in competition with the city but existing alongside it, patiently, waiting to become manifest. And yet, as the fates of Hiroshima, London, and Berlin show, this invisible forest is very much real. We usually envision the seed as but a transition between two plants, but it is also possible to conceive of the plant as but a transition between two seeds. Or the city as a transition between two forests, rubble giving birth to wild vines and loquats and pellitory of the wall.

also, you might like to read:

William Wordsworth Sees into the Life of Things - Lapham’s Quarterly

Take a look at these extraordinary images!

Its so wonderful to be sent material that's ideal the 'homage to the seed' blog. These came from a lovely friend Terri who thought I'd like to see these images from an International Photomicrography competition. Found at Boston.com its well worth a look at the entire collection of photographs!

Thank you Terri!

NB....the images I chose are mostly botany-related ... with several exceptions. Two are from the ocean and one I posted out of pure whimsy! You''ll see what I mean.

Small Worlds

The Nikon International Small World Photomicrography Competition recently announced its list of winners for 2010. The competition began in 1974 as a means to recognize and applaud the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. Peering into the small worlds of animal, plants and minerals using many techniques and different instruments, this year's entries brought us images of crystalline formations, fluorescent body parts, cellular structures and more, valuable for both their beauty and insight. The lovely folks at Nikon were kind enough to share some of their images here with us, be sure to click the link above to see all the winners. (29 photos total)

This 5th Place image of a Strelitzia reginae (bird of paradise) seed magnified 10 times comes from Viktor Sykora of the Institute of Pathophysiology, First Medical Faculty, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. This image was made with a stereomicroscopy technique called darkfield illumination. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

Magnified 100 times, a Mirabilis jalapa (four o'clock flower) stigma with pollen attached is seen. This 16th place image was made with epifluorescence and 3D reconstruction by Dr. Robert Markus Institute of Genetics, Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged, Hungary. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

A radiolarian, a type of zooplankton, is seen magnified 250x in this image made by Raymond Sloss of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society in Northampton, UK. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

This brightfield image shows part of the structure of living specimen of Martensia sp. (red seaweed), viewed at 40x magnification. This 6th Place image was made by Dr. John Huisman of Murdoch University, School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology in Murdoch, Australia. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

Patterns of light are seen in soap film, magnified 150 times in this 18th place image by Gerd Guenther from Dusseldorf, Germany. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

A Bryozoa, a tiny aquatic filter-feeder is seen at 20x magnification. Image made by Jocelyn Cheng of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

Magnified 40 times, this is a view of a bee's abdomen with grains of pollen attached. Image made by Dr. Robert Markus of the Institute of Genetics, Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged, Hungary. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

A single egg from a Hemiargus isola (Reakirt's blue butterfly) rests on Mimosa strigillosa (pink powderpuff) buds, viewed at 6x magnification. Image made by David Millard from Austin, Texas. (Courtesy of Nikon Small World) #

its never too late for the Homage to the Seed Mail Art show ...

all the way from Canada

Montreal in fact....

Trillium sp?

This package of 4 excellent photographs mounted on high quality water colour postcards arrived in the mail and I was given them today when I spent the day at the Botanic gardens where this Mail Art show was held.





I am so utterly delighted to receive them as I am hoping to show all the Mail Art cards again before the year is out. These will be proudly archived for future showings. Do please visit   Nathalie   if you wish to see her wonderful photography. She paints as well and is  Graphic designer who's work has crossed into science publications, various genres, public issues and such.
Over the past year I have very much enjoyed visiting her blog to see the wonderful shots from her daily life in and around Montreal and beyond.

Asclepias syriaca

Achillea millefolium

NB I do apologise for not managing to scan these images and instead photographing them with a less than wonderful camera to post here!!

Working in the Homage to the Seed journal

Working in the journal today I realised it was quite a while since I'd photographed images for the homage blog. These are some of the pages from this year's journal. Other pages have been added to this blog from time to time. As I downloaded them I was reminded I must find correct names for some that I have picked up to draw and not yet identified.

title page

These drawings vary greatly in approach and purpose of the drawing. When the Seed Lab is open and operating I am likely to do simple pen drawings and document notes whilst working and engaging in discussion about the Seed-banking process.

A variety of mediums is employed for work in the journal - and this is very much a thinking process as well as mediative one. Not all ideas will find their way into the paintings and larger works - but extensive journal work contributes greatly to the entire engagement with all kinds of concerns in producing a body of work.

One of the main preoccupations of the year visually and aesthetically has been exploring the enormous diversity of forms waiting to be discovered - whether by research and secondary methods such as library books from the Botanic Library at Mt Coot-tha or by drawing from the range of finds that are at my disposal or given to me by any number of people who look out for things I might like to draw.

The journal is the place I purposely investigate ideas that occur as I work. Unlike the discipline of the Botanical Illustrator whose goal is scientific accuracy my work is a distinct departure from such preoccupations and allows me the opportunity to see the seed, the pod or capsule as both motif and metaphor... as emerging from a continuum with unique structures and variations for each species being examined.

cross-sections of seed capsules from rainforest fruits

ovules

Albizia lebbeck

Same subject above... completely different materials and manner of working. Both works evolved into completely different ideas despite having started out as very similar colour pencil drawings. Unlike some artists who know exactly what it is they wish to replicate .... for me the possibility of something finding its ideal form and materials 

pushes me to take risks and accept that some works have even been lost from working it further.

Painfully slow this process may be - so much time spent working in the journal - but for me it is worth it. Well-worn formulas are not my preference.... nor repeating one or two ideas for a whole body of work. The challenge is to balance the need for truly animated forms with the desire for continuity and a focused vision. Certainly the journal generates the rhythm that can carry over into the making of the larger works.

Herein lies the metaphor of the seed...catalyst for that which grows out of its humble beginning!

Banksia - species not yet identified

Often one drawing is more representative of the subject.... which then leads to the abstraction on the opposite page.

Banksia seeds - interesting to note that fire is often the force that causes the dispersal of the banksia seeds... that or extreme heat.

The seed pod on the left is many times enlarged for dramatic effect.

The seeds on left were given to me by the Garden's caretaker... the right pod is from the Garden's carpark

Brachychiton

Syzygium oleosum: blue lilly pilly and  Alpinia caerulea: blue ginger

These are some of the pages... no doubt more will be added at some stage. The next few months will be very busy

working with this material as well as  new seeds collected by Jason Halford on the recent MSB /Seeds for life collecting trip in Northern Queensland.