Herbarium of unknown

I got this herbarium consisting of grass specimens as a present. The maker of it is unknown. The sheet are labeled with name of specimen, date and place of finding in a beautiful old handwriting. The grasses have left direct prints on the opposite pages.  

Herbarium At Home is a volunteer-based project that aims to catalogue and make available the wealth of data represented by the historical herbarium collections held by universities and museums in Great Britain. Everyone can join and help label (and in return look at the most amazing examples for free).

Raphael Hefti

 Installation view, Fluxia, Milano 

Raphael Hefti, Lycopodium, 2011, Photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium, dimensions 100 x 160 cm, unique copies  


"Raphael Hefti is an alchimist in his own right, he forms steel bars fragile as glas, lightens up whole mountain valleys or grows mushrooms on buckets in the exhibition space. His faszination and in- terest in the aesthetic potential of chemical processes and technical procedures is also the starting point for his work on view at Kunsthalle. In memory to Phlogiston (2010/11) and Lycopodiumprints (2010/11) are large format black and white and color photograms which have been exposed with the spores of the Lycopodium plant. The fine pored powder, which is known as medicine in Homeopa- thie and because of his high inflammability was called „witch craft xxx“ in the Middle Age , is used by Hefti as the light source of his images. The composition is foremost an accidental one – similar to the methods used in Drip or Action paintings in American Expressionism or Andy Warhols re- ference to these (Piss Paintings, 1977-78) – and the image composition is based on the immediacy of the material’s touch on the image carrier, every trace are to be visible. On the black and white photograms the light leaves surprisingly fine structures and layers, the color prints depict a spectre of lucid colors with unexpected depth." Kunsthalle Basel, 2011

Veronika Spierenburg - From right to left

Veronika Spierenburg, From right to left, site-specific action, National Library Helsinki,  blu-ray video, 16 min, 2009

See more of Veronika's work here.

Gwenneth Boelens

Hand-Wall, 2007, 16 mm film (original) or digitized on monitor, duration 4 min 35 s

 "Scanning the environment by eye-sight is an essential characteristic of Boelens’ work and taken literally in her filmic work Hand-Wall. As if to ascertain over and over again the limitations and restrictions, a person’s hand wanders along the walls and the windows of an undefined room. As the eye follows this movement a loose impression emerges – a feeling of the space that nevertheless remains insecure and is additionally interrupted by the look outside." (from The Entire Business of Coming Closer press release 2008)

Installation view Klemm's, Berlin

Negative. Rather than Truth, 2010, wood from reproduction table, ceramic notepad, magnifying glass, metal, crayon on glass, ink-jet prints, 68 x 58 x 74 cm   "Negative. Rather than Truth alludes to the idea of a source image through a handmade negative. The title refers to its status; it is an attempt to get to a distillment of reality. It did not yet materialize as an image; it rather precedes the image." 

You can see more of Gwenneth's work here and here. 

Max Ernst - Histoire Naturelle

"Histoire Naturelle" by Max Ernst consist of of a portfolio with thirty-four collotypes after frottage that he made in 1925. Like the nature prints this works are assembled from physical surfaces that he printed in the of him invented frottage technique to construct his own, surreal images. 

You can see more of the prints here.

The nature printed British sea-weeds

One more example of nature printing. The Nature-printed British Seaweeds, published by Henry Bradbury, (1859–60)

Nature printing

In 2010 I started a research on the arrangement and reproduction of plant specimens at the Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden. The library posses a large collection of rare books and herbariums, produced in many early methods of reproduction. It was there that I got introduced to nature printing, a technique that intrigued me through it’s potential to depict not only the appearance but also the physical surface of plants. The nature print technique was already used by Leonardo da Vinci, who printed the impression of an inked sage leaf in his notebook (Codex Atlanticus 1505). In 1830 printer in the Wiener Staatsdruckerei in Austria began to imprint plants on lead plates and use these as print forms. This was in a time when photography was still in its beginning and of no competition. The images remind on photographs as they are very precise in reproducing physical flat objects. I like how the printers where trying to the arrange the whole plants on the printing plates, as they where 1:1 reproductions in size. "Physiotypia plantarum austriacarum. Der Naturselbstdruck in seiner Anwendung auf die Gefässpflanzen des österreichischen Kaiserstaates, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Nervation in den Flächenorganen der Pflanzen", Constantin von Ettingshausen & Alois Pokorny, Viena, 1855–1873 This work consists of 12 volumes and depicts a total of 1000 plant specimens. You can look at this work in real at the Mertz Library of the The New York Botanical Garden. Its hard to find good reproductions of this books on the internet, so far the best once I saw where on ebay or just use google.

Another book produced in the nature print technique: "The ferns of Great Britain and Ireland" by Henry Bradbury, 1855. You can see scans of the book here.

Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins (1799 - 1871) was an English botanist and photographer. Atkins father was a close friend of Sir John Herschel who invented the Cyanotype process in 1842. Atkins applied this technique in her that self published in its first installment in 1843, which makes it the first book illustrated with photographic images. "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions" consisting of photograms of algae that were contact printed "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper".  I have seen the book in real on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York and almost could not get myself move away from the glass vitrine in which is was placed (last picture).

 You can see all pages of the book here.

Lithuanian National Costume

Scans of "Lithuanian National Costume"(by Baltos Lankos), a book I have purchased in Nida at the Maxima, (the one and only supermarket here in the village). It's a collection of re-enacted photographs of people wearing 19th century national costumes of Lithuania, published in 2006. I am mostly intrigued by the strange mixture of the celebration of folk culture and it's staged presentation but also look at them with some humor. 

guest blogger • eva-fiore kovacovsky

hello to this week's guest blogger eva-fiore kovacovsky. eva is blogging from an artist residency in nida and reports: "nida is great! like living in my own time zone somehow. beautiful it is, all the sand, the wind, the dunes, the sun..." see more of her work here.

[eva-fiore kovacovsky. halm (inkjet photocopies of blades of gras, paper bound in green linen). 2010-11.]

archive • Green Screen Wizard

green screen wizard has some good samples of what you can do with it's software. more here.


[all from Green Screen Wizard]

archive is a column by asha schechter