Current project: Herbaria and notebooks, Museum in the Park
Before lock down I returned to the Museum in the Park stores to look at artefacts for a new project.
I was attracted to the notebooks sometimes known as ‘Herbaria.’ I found three of these particularly interesting.
– A handmade book with a faded marbled cover (1856) titled One Hundred Specimens of British Mosses. Inside, each page was filled with small pressed species of moss with details of each written in ibeautiful cursive script.
– A hand-bound book in which each page is filled with the most equisite numbered ink drawings of shells, in fine detail. A glossary on the opposite page lists, names and give details of each.
– The third book is a book of fungi , with what looks like a snail-eaten aged brown cover and very old photographs of a man (possibly the author) in a tree. It contains other fungi photographs as well as childlike drawings explaining aspects of fungi life.
I feel passionate about these books and treasure the care and thought that went into their making. I would love to enable others to see and engage with them.
This is my work in progress and I am thinking possibly of making my own book works and interactive work to involve the viewer in a physical and emotional way – as I did with the nests and eggs. But this will unfold over the next few years….
Insight Printmakers will be working with a variety of items from the collection over the next two years, after which the new work will be exhibited alongside the artefacts.