During the last few weeks of the Covid lockdown, projects I’ve been working towards over 2-3 years have been halted in their tracks, maybe irretrievably, and my walking artist practice has been curtailed somewhat. Having come to terms with that, for the time being at least, I began to refocus on my local walks in and around Frankwell in Shrewsbury.
Very soon I found myself working on ideas for three or more artist books (more on that in a future post or two) and developing some areas of my practice that I had planned to use in a couple of projects. These involved using plant materials and found objects to make and adapt paper or fabric for further use in drawings, collage, painting or printmaking. I began to create a process of making work about the landscape using materials from the landscape.
In addition, with schools being closed, I was able to spend more time working with my 11 year old daughter, Eliza. We experimented with materials and learnt some new techniques together.
Eliza assisted in making a couple of short videos demonstrating paper making with plant materials and scrap paper. These videos can be used by anyone as a resource to try this out for themselves.
Here’s the first in which we prepare pulp from garden plants:
Here’s the second explaining how we then made paper with plant and scrap paper pulp using some simple equipment:
After this, we did some sketches and paintings of some garden flowers.
We tried printing on our paper using flowers and leaves gathered from around the garden – I’ve enjoyed doing this with groups following walks in the past. Here is a brief downloadable guide to dyeing/printing paper or fabric using plants and rust:
A small selection of examples of our prints:
Just to add a durational aspect to our work, we planted some woad seeds, and hopefully by the Autumn we will have a good batch of leaves so that we can make some beautiful indigo dye to add to our dyes using madder root and weld.
No Time Like the Present 