PRINTING WITH PLANTS
PRINTING WITH PLANTS
Often when we walk through a landscape we are looking for larger patterns, but when we walk to look for plant material to use in a print, it changes the scale of our observations and gives us a renewed appreciation for the peculiarities of form that exist. This autumn we collected seed from big bluestem, wild senna and rattlesnake master to make prints.
We use printmaking to advance the study of the landscape as a process driven, texturally rich, and accretive phenomenon. It is important to our practice that while we are walking the prairie or thinking about management at the site scale that we are also engaging with the materiality of the place at the scale of the individual plant.
The making of each vegetal print creates an opportunity to work closely with individual plants at a fine scale: dry seed heads of spiny sowthistle explode under the pressure of the printing press creating a confetti of white marks; crushed garlic mustard and wild oat suffused the air with smells of onion, herbs and hay; slender stems of creeping buttercup incised oxbow lines. In their translation to drawings, the paper absorbs sensory information that might otherwise be lost or overlooked.
