New page, new project!!! Still a work in progress.......

As the year began to turn inwards and the days grow shorter, I took a walk around my neighbourhood and poked around in the piles of garden waste on the boulevards. The stalks and leaves of plants and grasses were mingled with twigs and branches from pruned shrubs.

I picked up some grasses and twisted them into a ring as I walked. Three cuttings from a vine were pliable enough to be plaited together. Back home, I wrapped wool and more plant material around plant stems, both as decoration and as a way to hold the forms I had created in place, resulting in a series of sculptural objects that both echo and contrast with natural forms. Inherently fragile, they continued to dry and fade after I have made them, even as they were displayed on my studio wall. All that is now left of them are these photos, in which the natural colours and textures of the plants contrast against the white background and yellow and pink tape.

Later in the winter, I used dried and withered leaves, fronds, needles and flowers from my garden to create cyanotypes out of doors. Even a grey, cloudy day provides enough light to create a picture if you are patient. The resulting images are not perfect representations of plants. They are fugitive, reflecting the poignancy of faded plants whose season of blooming is over.

In the process of photosynthesis, plants use light energy to create sugar, their food. Making these plant cyanotypes and constructions is an incredibly tactile and grounding experience. But in the end all that is left of the plants recorded here are images, also created with light, using a phone and chemically treated paper.