art – Page 2 – Living Field

Maize paper

Most of our paper comes from plants, but the process by which leaves and stems are converted to sheets that we can write on or wrap things in is unknown to most of us.

As part of her work with the Living Field, Jean Duncan has been making paper from plants grown in the garden.

She started with some maize, which is a tropical and sub-tropical species originally from the Americas. Some types can now grow in our climate, and it was one of these that was grown in the garden for its cobs (corn on the cob).

Jean used the maize plants to make the paper. Here is a description of what she did.

Step 1 is to collect maize leaves and stems when they are in good condition, still green.

Step 2 is to cut the leaves and stems into small pieces. Leaf pieces should be about the size of those in the white bowl. The tough stems were cut into larger pieces (right below).

Step 3 – put the cut material into an enamel bowl or pot (above left). Add soda ash to the material, 1 teaspoon for a 10 litre pot, and mix.

Step 4 – cook the plants for 3 hours, or more if the material is tough. At this point you will need pH indicator strips (litmus paper) to check that the cooking is going according to plan. (Litmus can be bought on-line or at some gardening shops.) The pH of the mixture should be around 8, but if it drops to 7 or 6 then add a little more soda ash. When cooked, the fibre should be soft and easy to tear.

Step 5 – rinse the fibre thoroughly in water; when fully rinsed the pH or the water should be neutral (i.e. about 7).

Step 6 – the fibre now needs to be beaten to a pulp. The traditional way is to beat it with a mallet for a few hours. (Craft-workers in some countries still use this method). An alternative, if you have electricity, is a kitchen blender working in short bursts so as not to burn out the motor. Jean uses a machine called a Hollander beater.

Step 7 – the fibres are now ready to be transformed into sheets of paper. The pulp is suspended in water. A ‘mould and deckle’ is lowered into the water (image above) and brought out slowly with a flat layer of fibre on it, or else the pulp is poured into the mould and deckle until there is a flat layer of the right thickness for the type of pulp (which you work out by trial and error); the water drains out through holes leaving the moist fibre.

Step 8 – the moist sheet of fibre is turned onto an absorbent fabric or board or something similar for drying and pressing, a procedure that takes about 3 days (top right in images below).

lf_jd_mzppr_shtstchngs_jd_1100 — Maize paper: lighter sheet (top left) is from the husk round the cobs, the darker sheet from stems; etchings below of root cross sections (Jean Duncan)

And that’s it – a sheet of paper!

Info, links

Khadi papers India. Web site: khadi.com. Youtube: Papermaking at Khadi Papers India

Jean’s recent work on an exhibition of etchings using her own-made paper: The Beauty of Roots and Root art.

[Update with minor amendments 10 June and 27 July 2017]

The Beauty of Roots

Exhibition, Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, 17-30 March 2017. More images here.

Sectioned II

Our artist friend, Jean Duncan has been trying out new techniques, getting inspiration and materials from the Living Field garden and from microscopic sections of roots. Jean writes about her depictions of brassica roots:

“The print is an etching made on a zinc plate by drawing with a needle into soft wax and then etching the lines in copper sulphate. Ink is rubbed in to the etched lines and then printed on wet paper.

“My idea is to print root sections and plant drawings on to plant papers. I want to combine ancient techniques of papermaking with the latest microscopic images in a way that will highlight the plant’s diversity and engage people in how plants can enrich soils as well as provide food.

“For papermaking, the most successful fibres so far have come from maize stalks from the Living Field garden. These are chopped and simmered for several hours in soda ash to break down the fibres. The long fibres are then bashed further in a Hollander beater like a large grinder. Sheets of paper are then formed on a mould and stacked for printing or casting. Wet paper sheets can be pushed into plaster moulds of the plants and roots and when they dry the plant is embossed into the paper.

“So it’s a long process but I am currently working on a latex cast of a plant root and it’s been successful so far. It may even be useful to scientists as a way of preserving the fragile roots in a way that means they can be handled without being damaged.

Sources/contacts

Jean Duncan on this web site (with links): art/jean-duncan

The original microscopic cross section of a root was provided by Robert Baker of the Department of Botany, University of Wyoming. [Ed: the original links given for this image are no longer active but are retained for reference – http://www.robertlbaker.org and http://www.macromicroscopic.com ]

Here it is.

And thank you for allowing us to use it on this site.

[More to follow from Jean’s experimenting ….]

Sectioned

Through a brassica root by Jean Duncan based on micrograph by Robert Baker. More at Sectioned II …

Wullie hunting

Around Dundee this summer were spotted those with their mobile phones in hand, but this wasn’t for the Pokemon Go craze, this was for the Oor Wulliecraze. They were popping up everywhere and where there was a Wullie was someone, from young children to adults, with their Bucket Trail map and/or phone app…. writes Linda Ford.

The Oor WullieBucket Trail in Dundee and the surrounding area was such great fun! In a stroke of genius The Archie Foundation teamed up with Wild in Art and DC Thomson to raise funds for Tayside Children’s Hospital and with an auction total of £883,000 for 70 Oor Wullies, it was definitely a huge success.

The £50,000 that the Oor Original sold for is a clear indication of how much of a beloved icon Oor Wullie is to those of us who grew up reading about his exploits in the Sunday Post each week and the yearly annuals.

Many of the Wullies were designed around something close to Dundee’s heart, such as the Wullie the Menace, which of course, was situated on Bash Street.

Here are some more Oor Wullies. The one below is called Whar Ji Cum Fi? It was in the Howff. It’s reflective so you can see yourself in it.

And here are four where they were assembled before being auctioned. They are Strawberry Thief (one of the Oot an Aboot touring Wullies), Woodland Wullie (upper right), Lillies, inpired by Monet (lower left) and Oor Original.

Links

More info and what they sold for can be found here
http://www.oorwulliebuckettrail.com/

Hay-racks

Nocni dialog, oil, 1964 by Vida Fakin. More on Vida ….

Macoto Murayama and T rep

T rep. The short form given by our field survey teams to white clover Trifolium repens. Still a common plant of pasture and waysides, so common that the intricacies of its structure and function generally go unnoticed.

Yet the mathematical artworks by Macoto Murayama shown in July at Dundee University reveal these intricacies in astonishing detail (image right).

The exhibition was held by courtesy of Frantic Gallery, Tokyo.

The Living Field’s correspondent gk-images sent some cellphone snaps from the exhibition.

The introduction gives some detail of the artist and how he transfers the complex flowering heads and flowers of his botanical subjects to two-dimentional images.

“Macoto Murayama is a Japanese artist who cultivates ‘inorganic flora’. His extraordinary images are created after minutely dissecting real flowers and studying [them] under a microscope. His drawings are then modelled in 3D imaging software then rendered into 2D compositions on photoshop before being printed on a large scale.”

Born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1984 he is now a researcher at Institute of Advanced Media and Art and Sciences, Tokyo.

The photographs, with reflections of lights and the opposite wall are of white clover (top) and spanish broom (lower).

Sources, links

Dundee University – Macoto Murayama: Growth and Form Exhibition. 14 May to 20 August 2016. Lamb Gallery, Tower Building, Dundee. Click the link for opening times.

Macoto Murayama at Frantic gallery: http://frantic.jp/en/artist/artist-murayama.html

Frantic Gallery Tokyo. Looks like some great exhibitions, for example the Universe and other Oddities by Zen Tainaka.

On Growth and form, a classic treatise by D’Arcy Thompson. Web site http://www.darcythompson.org/about.html

Images Thanks to gk-images for the photographs shown here.

Ps Back to T. rep. There would be, in the 1940s, five or six legumes growing as ‘weeds’ in cornfields but they have since been ousted by nitrogen fertiliser and chemical herbicide. Trifolium repens is one of the the last remaining of these nitrogen fixers still found, but then rarely, in arable fields.

More than landscape (2)

Slovenian countryside, hay-racks, the artist Vida Fakin

Travelling through the countryside of Slovenia, through the intimate patchwork of fields and enclosures, attention is repeatedly drawn to the hay-racks that stand sometimes isolated in pasture and sometimes clustered around farmsteads.

These hay racks embody a very direct and very local chain from soil to plant to beast to field. Hay is cut from meadows and grassy places, collected and hung over horizontal wooden poles to dry, then fed to farm animals when the natural pasture is out of season.

The hay-racks take on a range of forms, from two simple concrete posts spanned by a corrugated iron roofing strip to two-storied structures having the wooden poles along the side, rooms above, partly open at least on one side, and a place below for farm machinery (images below).

So it was good fortune to meet the daughter (Mojca Suklje) and granddaughter (Helena Suklje) of the artist Vida Fakin whose interests, among many, were the ikons of the Slovenia countryside and in particular its hay-racks and scarecrows set against a backdrop of mountain pasture and rocky hills.

And it was even better when Mojca and Helena agreed to provide material about Vida and her art for the Living Field web site.

We will begin with the notes for an exhibition of Vida Fakin’s works held in 2015 at the Josef Stefan Institute Ljubljana.

The black and white images above were taken by the editor in the Bohinj area of Slovenia, around Studor and on higher pasture.

The image at the top of the page is the front cover of Monografija / Vida Fakin – Ljubljana: Enotnost 1994.

Living Field page on Vida Fakin. Also More than landscape and Hay-racks.

More than landscape

Vida Fakin: cover of Monografija 1994 Zalozba Enotnost.

More …

Among tree ferns and mountain ash – the William Ricketts Sanctuary

William Ricketts began in 1934 to create his Sanctuary in a hilly region of the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, Australia. He fused fired-clay images, mainly of Aboriginal people, with the lie of slope and rock on a hillside vegetated with trees and tree-ferns. He believed that people could live together and with nature, and that destruction and exploitation were not inevitable.

The images are now shaded by layers of vegetation. The upper canopy is mostly the leaf and branch of australian mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, tall and straight, said to be the tallest of the Angiosperms (non-conifers), and so very different from our own mountain ash or rowan. Below them are a few medium sized trees and then the tree ferns, luxuriant above the paths and sculptures. (A part of a tree fern is included in each of the sets of images on this page.)

At the base are herbs, ferns and mosses, growing close to and in some instances on the sculptures. This proximity gives the site an organic feel, the images becoming part of the scene, aided by the artist taking casts of the rocks so that he could match the base of the clay precisely with its intended location.

The clay images come alive in their setting. Many are part covered in a green algal film that must change with the seasons. Water droplets lie on them. Rivulets of water flow over them. Insects and fallen leaves rest on them and they change as the gums and tree ferns filter the light. There are touches of William Blake in the way figures swirl and flow into each other.

Ricketts was born in 1898, a little more than a century after the main phase of European colonisation began. He spent many years living with Aboriginal Australians, learning their approach to life and how they managed vegetation and land. He also created works for natural locations farther north, in central Australia.

He died in 1993, aged 94. He lives through the Sanctuary, his various other works and a few writings, but most of all through the memories of people who have seen his works in their intended setting.

The Sanctuary is managed by Parks Victoria. As with all other images on the Living Field site, images of William Ricketts’ works here are displayed ‘not for profit’ (taken October 2015).

Sources

Parks Victoria State Government web page on the William Ricketts Sanctuary (with access to a downloadable PDF guide)

Brady P. 1995. Whitefella Dreaming: the authorised biography of William Ricketts. Published by Preferred Image.

The Wikipedia entry gives further references.

Tree fern overhead at the William Ricketts Sanctuary (Squire)