I love to listen to the natural world speaking and what I hear informs my work. Over the past eighteen months I have collected and pressed the wild plants in the forest around my mountain home. It is a redwood and chaparral habitat of everything wild and untouched – except by the dramatically changing climate. My desire is for the artworks to be shown widely. Presented as portraits, ‘Old Masters’, hung in Victorian salon style, to make the plants visible and valued for who they are, and to promote the need for a new symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom and our planet.

NATURE, Speaking Clearly

Grasses, Weeds and Wild Surprises – a work in progress.

This summer of 2021, has been the driest for a century and I have witnessed nature struggling and adapting to new conditions. Plants have grown thinner and smaller with minimal bloom. As our teachers and heroes the wild plants mirror Humanity’s path of survival and provide endless gifts of healing,

The pressed plants are scanned in all their complete wildness, roots and all. As portraits, some will be shown as actual pressings, each in an elaborate frame, while others, in virtual frames as large Gicleé prints. All will be identified including their medicinal content. Even the most humble weed has medicinal properties that perhaps could be critical to our future on the planet.

Frame images: 123RF

See Project page for ongoing development of the project.