The colour in the garden is surging and this palette catches my eye. I have come across the Hapazome printing technique through Babs Behan and am eager to try it. This happens one evening after a busy day, and as I have picked the flowers I decide to haphazardly hapazome through the weariness i.e. I know i’m not doing it quite right, but this has been my approach to this alchemy botanical alchemy making so far so I decide that any attempt is better than no attempt.
The delicacy of these images is striking. Noting bold and brash. Colour strong, and it won’t last. This week I have decided to step further into sharing my experiments on my social media pages, and am already enjoying the interaction it is creating. These words I wrote in light of these above experiments:
First haphazard attempt at botanical printing. 🌱
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These colours won’t last on paper, but that is the pure beauty of it. The landscape outside is different to how it was last month, last week. We are different too, the fleshy bag of nature we call home.
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We are all becoming painfully aware of the delicacy of our ecosystem on this earth, and how much the human race has destroyed over the last few decades. Decades! A blip in time, but a mammoth impact on how our whole system functions.
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Engaging with the delicacy, beauty, pain and transience of life is something I hold closely within my creative practice. I have a longer piece of writing about this bubbling within me which I will share soon over on my Root + Write blog space.
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Over this last year I have been deeply reflecting on what it is I am doing (with this one wild and precious life) and how I am doing it. It’s the nature of being a highly sensitive introvert, for sure. Always with the big thinks and feels. One small, but profound shift has been recognising that as much as there are maHOOsive reasons to despair about where our world is veering off to, there are also so many moments and encounters that bring joy and connection. Often this is sitting with discomfort and pain. Feeling the truth that. Hope. Not for an idealised future where there is only laughter and fairy dust, but a hope that individually we are incredible and together – and I count the vastly wordless natural world in this – we are sublime.
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Our reconnection to the natural world – and recognising it as not something outside of ourselves – is vital. This isn’t a process of discovery, but excavation and recovery.
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It is right there. Underneath the layers of social conditioning and distraction. That wildly uncivilised part.
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FERAL Ink. 