While in the process of handling and pressing dozens of exquisite freesia blooms, I began planning post card size vignettes invoking ideas of memory, loss, wit, and nostalgia.
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Steel Heart |
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Miss Conception |
I combined the pressed flowers with embroidery, relief printed images, stitch, ephemera, drawing, and language.
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Red Shoes |
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How To |
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Headspace |
Pressing flowers, petals or leaves, has persisted for hundreds of years as a memory keeping method of preserving plant material, perhaps a blossom from a loved one, received in response to heartfelt love, or a tragic loss or simply picked up in a meadow on a special day; a fragment of an intimacy shared.
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The End |
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And Then It Poured |
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Don't Hold Your Breath |
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Heart Throb |
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Please Write |
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Post |
Pressing was also useful as a record keeping of a more pragmatic sort, a way to preserve plants specimens for identification and cataloguing by plant explorers and botanists. The process is sometimes used for art-making.
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Plant Life |
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One and Only |