Research/Studio Visit: Sarah Simblet

Sarah Simblet, sketchbook study for Botany for the Artist 

On 13th June '16, I visited Sarah at her home and studio in rural Oxfordshire.

Sarah is a fine artist, writer, broadcaster and anatomist, whose work explores the relationship between science, history and art i. As an academic consultant she has co-selected or contributed to national and international art and science exhibitions at venues such as the Wellcome Trust and Science Museum, and in broadcasting she contributes regularly to BBC radio and television debates about the relationship between science and art ii.

I was eager to meet with Sarah due to her expertise in botany and her combined interests in art, history and science. She has written and illustrated several books, including Botany for the Artist: An Inspirational Guide to Drawing Plants (2010). It was an enriching day spent talking to her about her work - looking at sketches, sketchbooks and finished drawings; storyboards for publications; and hearing about her methodologies for working with plant specimens.

Sarah's pocket-size paper pages with sketches planning the layout for Botany for the Artist

Sarah's exquisite and meticulous, anatomical approach to drawing plants is inspiring. In my practice, I'm conscious of aspiring to precision and exactitude, while the materials I use, combined with limitations of dexterity result in works that veer away from scientific accuracy to embrace distortions and errors. When they work best, I think, it's because they retain a specificity of trying really hard to communicate something, while absorbing selective references that enter the work as a result of looking, finding connections and playing with ideas and materials. Sarah's approach and skills are very different and this holds an attraction and fascination. 

Cross-section of a pine cone

I gleaned much from hearing her talk about how she works with plant specimens - holding them in her hand, to get a sense of how they feel, how they shift and wilt - haptic information from one hand mediated and synthesised through looking, to be recorded on the page with the other. The best way to learn about how plants are constructed, Sarah advised, is to pull them apart - revealing where and how the component parts are joined together.

Schematic diagrams of inflorescences, showing how they branch.
'They act as a simplified key. In each diagram the largest circle indicates the first flower to open, and the successively smaller circles show the sequence in which the following flowers open and then bear fruit'. See Botany for the Artist, p. 187.

A page from one of Sarah's hand-bound sketchbooks. Images (here a sketch planning her garden) are reworked by pasting new sections of paper onto the page, which can be lifted up to view the original idea/sketch underneath.

Spread from Botany for the Artist

Cross sections

As in the right hand side images above, cutting a flower part in half longitudinally reveals the inner structure of its anatomy, showing the symmetry or, less often, the asymmetry of the plant. The specimen takes on the form of a diagram of itself, which can be simplified and clarified through drawing, and which become, in my mind, like machine mechanisms, making me think of the strange machine drawings and relief works of Eva Hesse.

Left: Eva Hesse 'No Title', 1965. Right: 'Oomamaboomba', 1965. Images taken from Hauser & Wirth website.

Arthur Harry Church

Following a recommendation from Sarah, I arranged a visit to the Natural History Museum library, to look at boxes of drawings and the original manuscripts of Church. Further details to follow in a separate post.

Arthur Harry Church, Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea L., 7 May 1905

Book suggestions and follow-up research:

Wallpaper (1963)

Research Visit to D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, Dundee.

25 - 27 May 2016

Visit to the University of Dundee to look at D'Arcy Thompson's collection of teaching models in the Zoology Museum, and botanical wall charts at the university Herbarium.

Huge thanks to Matthew Jarron, Museum Curator for his insightful tours, sharing his expertise of the collections, and generously facilitating meetings with colleagues in the Plant Sciences and English departments.

Thinking about the role of the 'model' and the 'wall chart' as visual teaching and information aids. As an amateur looking at these objects, I enjoy how they become curious specimen trophies; abstracted fragments communicating structures and cross-sections of flea-heads and worm embryos, animal brains, livers, larvae....Making quick drawings of them in my sketchbook, they shift to become character sketches for possible sculptures.

Across the collection there's an overall homogeneity of size - each 'thing' scaled up to domestic proportions, designed to sit on a desk or shelf in the lab, or to be held in the hand and rotated? An equivalent today: the 3d modelling videos that rotate on the screen. This youtube video of the Reproductive Cycle of Flower Plants, contains a nice example, about 2 mins in.

Model-makers from the collection include: Edward Gerrard & Sons, c. 1850 - 1967, London and
Vaclav Fric, Czech naturalist, 1839 - 1916, Prague. Most are fabricated in plaster, unlike the Auzoux papier mache models, or older wax models.

Herbarium Collections, University of Dundee

The collection includes a large number of beautifully illustrated series of botanical wallcharts, depticting plant systematics.
Below are a few examples, some of which were created by Dr Arnold Dodel-Port, of the University of Zurich, between 1878 - 1883.

A complete set of digitised images of the Dodel-Port Atlas can be seen on the Memory of the Netherlands website.

Further wall charts in the University of Dundee collection can be viewed on their website at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/museum/exhibitions/teaching/, including the von Shroeder wallcharts, c. 1884 - 1907, which show the latest chemical industrial processes with which Germany at that time led the world.

 

Patrick Geddes - Thinking Machines

Matthew tells me about Patrick Geddes, polymathic Scottish planner and botanist. Geddes was the first Professor of Botany at the University and initiated the herbarium collection. Many of the teaching charts in the collection were used by him. Plant structures and systems inspired his thinking and are influential in his approach to town planning.

In October 2015, the University and Geddes Institute held The City is a Thinking Machine, an exhibition and series of events evaluating the relevance of Geddes' thinking for contemporary practice: 'The city thinks us. We think ourselves by thinking the city. The Scottish polymathic planner and botanist, Sir Patrick Geddes, was able to articulate conceptual frameworks – what he called ‘thinking machines’ – for understanding the evolution of cities and democratic social organisations'. 

Apparently Patrick Geddes and William Morris met (and fell out) at the 1888 Arts & Crafts conference in Edinburgh, and through Geddes, Morris is linked to D'Arcy Thompson, though there is no record that the two men met.

There are notable connections in the thinking of Morris and Geddes, the latter of which is often quoted: 'Think global, act local' and 'By leaves we live'; and who was concerned about losing connection to the seasons through industry, looking instead to nature to inspire town planning where cities are growing organisms. 

For more on Patrick Geddes:

Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 1915

Matthew Jarron, The Artist, the Thinker: John Duncan & Patrick Geddes in Dundee

Plant Sciences

Conversation with Claire Halpin, Head of Plant Sciences about 'green factories'/'field factories' - the manipulation of plants (eg. starch) for different products. The use of coal (compacted fossilised plants) in Victorian industry, which has contributed to climate change, and how now we are looking to plants to fix the problem, creating carbon-neutral bio-fuel.

Claire describes lignin to me - the hardening compound in plants, that creates the woody shells of seeds. In cellulose, the long fibres are coated by lignin to form the analogous equivalent of steel rods in concrete.

I attend the 2016 Distinguished Lecture by Jane Langdale, Professor of Plant Development at University of Oxford, regarding the C4 Rice Project.

Victorian Sci-Fi featuring plants:

H G Wells, The Time Machine
H. G. Wells, First Men in the Moon, 1901 (accelerated plant growth)
Georges Melies, Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902

Edward Page Mitchell, The Balloon Tree, 1883 (intelligent plants)

Camille Flannarion, Lumen, c. 1860's (sentient trees)

See also:
Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science, 2014
Brian Aldiss,  Hothouse, 1962

With thanks to Dr Keith Williams, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee, for the recommendations.

PLANTWORKS: A FACTORY AS IT MIGHT BE

This blog will chart the development of work and ideas for a forthcoming project, PLANTWORKS.

PLANTWORKS will culminate in a site-specific intervention of cardboard plant-machines and their 2d counterparts, at the William Morris Gallery in April - May 2017. The project will explore Morris’s relationship to industry and technology, creating ‘A Factory As It Might Be’ in the Stairwell and Story Lounge of the gallery.

PLANTWORKS is generously supported by Grant for the Arts, Bow Arts Trust and support in kind from William Morris Gallery.

Please visit my website www.claremitten.com for images of my work and further information.