I believe I mentioned in a previous entry that I wanted to share some artwork that was on display at the Homer Babbidge Library (aka Club Homer) at UConn while I was there.
The artist, Ann Parker, calls the series
"Botanical Metamorphics." Ms. Parker used a process called Photogramming (I guess it is trademarked) to capture the images, which she describes in a couple of
short explanations:
"Using only a light source and a lens to project forms onto archival colour-sensitive paper, photographer Ann Parker has eliminated both film and camera to produce Photograms she calls Botanical Metamorphics. Parker's work explores the structure of botanical subjects and reveals their inner forms. As a society we have become sadly out of touch with the powerful simplicity of nature," she says. "We are presented with an overwhelming choice of fruits, vegetables and flowers, but they more and more frequently come to us dyed, saturated with chemicals, bleached, dehydrated, reconstituted, gassed and tightly cocooned in plastic. I want this new body of work to not only amaze and delight, but also emotionally involve the viewer in the absolute beauty of botanical forms."
The pieces are rather large --- some were nearly 3' x 4' --- which was what struck me initially. The size allowed for a viewing that was like looking through a giant microscope. As you view from further or nearer, you see the object from different levels. From further off, you got the macrocosmic effect of seeing such things as a fig section, daffodils, a beautiful jack-in-the-pulpit, or "Sugar Peas" which I've included above (my favorite). But as you walked closer, mimicking magnification, there was such detail revealed in each plant or fruit that most people never get to see.
The impressiveness of Ms. Parker's work was heightened for me because, in that senior-year semester, I was taking a botany course to fill a science requirement. I hadn't expected to enjoy that class as much as I did. If the realization hadn't come so late in the day academic-wise, I might have seriously considered switching majors. Anyway, the concepts we were learning in class and the lab really meshed into the displays. You could see the individual hesperidium sacs in the citrus piece, the sclerids in the pear, the pistils, stamens and seeds. I was also in a Shakespeare course --- my first real foray into his writing, and was struck by how much the Bard called upon botanical imagery; this is especially the case with a deep reading of the often simplistically treated Sonnet 18. There are occurrences in learning that just come together, sometimes from completely different subjects that augment each other to create a higher level of understanding and change the point of view one might have had only studying one subject.
The pricing on these works is considerable --- if I recall correctly, anywhere from about one thousand to two thousand dollars. At this time, that's a little out of reach for my budget. It is my (selfish?) hope that Ms. Parker might allow these to go into poster prints, but I could allow that she might want these to be treated as non-commercial art.
