I wanted to create a series of work inspired by my garden but not of my garden. Inspired by the frottage artist Max Ernst, images of my plant rubbings were expanded and manipulated digitally to find the most pleasing compositions.

What is frottage? The Tate website states: ‘Frottage is a surrealist and ‘automatic’ method of creative production that involves creating a rubbing of a textured surface using a pencil or other drawing material’

What led me to use plant rubbings in my work?

Welwyn Garden City, near to where I live, was due to celebrate it’s centenary in 2020 and the artists at Digswell Arts, which I had recently joined, planned the ‘In Our Garden’ exhibition to mark the occasion. I found the theme strangely difficult because although I have a good sized garden, it’s not somewhere I look for inspiration, usually preferring more open spaces. I wanted my work to be inspired by my garden but not of my garden.

After much thinking and research and inspired by the surrealist Max Ernst and his Natural History (Histoire Naturelle) drawings, I set about taking plant rubbings in the garden….lots of them.

How I used the plant rubbings in my designs

In a nod to the Surrealists, I wanted to use an amalgamation of my rubbings to create an image of nature that didn’t really exist, one from my imagination. To help me achieve this, I used a tool that wasn’t available to Max Ernst - Photoshop Elements.

In the image below, you can see one of my plant stem rubbings (1) and a section of the rubbing magnified (2). I digitally stitched a number of these close-ups together to create the ‘land’ in the Lone Tree series (see above) and a rubbing of a leaf as the tree.

Similarly, the image for ‘Raven Head’ (below) was created from five different rubbings. I loved the way the flower head ‘emerged’ from the frottage process. My starting point was a dried seed head which looked pretty uninspiring but created wonderful wispy marks when the charcoal ran off it’s edge.

PRINTING THE IMAGES

Through a specialist photographic process these images were etched into a printing plate. I feel quite an attachment to these images as each of them is made up from a selection of plants, they seem to represent my garden in a nutshell. But printing them was not without it’s difficulties, as it was a real challenge to keep the clear space around them clean.

FINALLY EXHIBITING THE WORK

Although, these works haven’t been exhibited in Welwyn Garden City yet, I’m really pleased that these prints and the 3rd in the series Melange, are on display in an unused space in Letchworth, the first Garden City. Thanks goes to the Broadway Gallery and Letchworth Culture Project.

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