Into the Making World at Oak Spring
Allison Fulton
Figure 1
During my stay in Spring 2022 at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation for the course Pioneers of Natural History Illustration, I spent most of my hours in the soft glow of Bunny Mellon’s library examining countless botanical sketches, watercolors, and prints. But one day early in the course, Dr Kay Etheridge brought us out into the garden and asked us to spend an hour sketching. I initially tried to capture the knots and gnarls of trees that line the garden walls—a signature of Bunny Mellon’s estate—but I had a tough time drawing them. So, I focused on the daffodils and pansies, trying to capture the depth and shape of the overlapping petals. After an hour of sketching, we made our way over to an empty building down Mill Reef Road where we spent the afternoon turning our sketches into prints. To do this, we transferred our sketches onto rubber blocks, carving away parts of the rubber using linoleum cutting tools to create negative space. Then we took up brayers, or small hand rollers, to thinly apply ink to the rubber blocks, placed the blocks ink side down on pieces of paper, and used a baren to rub the un-inked side of the rubber block into the paper (fig. 1). By the end of the day, we had transformed the once-empty building we were working in into a printed garden bursting with flowers, plants, and trees (fig. 2).
Figure 2
This tactile making process stayed with me as we returned to library sessions throughout the week. Whether we were comparing different editions of artist naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis, examining papier-mâché flower models from the late-nineteenth century used to teach students floral morphology, or perusing collections of etchings that served as copying models for complex embroidery patterns, I kept thinking about these images and objects through the processes that made them through their making processes. How did the chosen making process determine the final botanical image? And how did the making process that was used to create the image or model determine their scientific function? With these questions in mind, during my first independent research session I looked at a one-of-a-kind book of paper flower drawings made by Mary Wise. Crafted for her close friend Jane Lane in 1856, the small book is packaged to resemble a gift: the decorative book is contained in a beautiful, marbled box that itself is slipped into a handmade pink fabric envelope clasped with a small button (figs 3-4). Within the book, Wise’s paper flowers fill the pages to stunning 3D effect, achieved from the way that she layered and overlapped small paper cut outs of leaves and petals (fig. 5). The various petals and leaves are not simply layered atop one another—the stems and branches emerge in and out of leaf layers and some of the petals are made from a semi-transparent paper that allows stems to partially show through from beneath. This same paper is fascinating for its texture which is almost felt-like to the touch, much like the texture of a silky-smooth pansy petal. Not all of the flowers use this felt-like paper (fig. 6); some petals are made of metallic paper that displays a fine shimmer and others use richly-colored paper with a glossy finish.
Figure 3
I discovered this book in Lucia Tongiori Tomasi’s delightful Oak Spring Flora, a selected collection of Oak Spring’s library materials about flowers. In Tomasi’s description of the book, she suggests that—in today’s parlance—we might refer to the book as a “multi-material object.” As a bookmaker and printmaker, I was struck by this description because it both brings attention to the multiple making practices at play in creating the object and invites a way of viewing the object that could expand it beyond its singular object-ness as an example of a Victorian sentimental domestic craft. Moreover, I was struck by how Tomasi’s descriptor might allow us to consider Wise’s book via the contemporary form of the artists’ book, or a mixed media work of art in book form that is made for political, experimental, or narrative means. The collection of paper flower drawing fits this descriptor in the sense that it adheres to the form of a bound book yet plays with the artistic and aesthetic representation of flowers by employing an unlikely medium—paper—to capture their likeness on the page.
Figure 4
To that end, I’d like to think about Mary Wise’s book of paper flower drawings through contemporary artist and scholar Johanna Drucker’s performative approach to the book that asks what book objects do and how they work as opposed to merely interrogating books for what they are. In other words, rather than focusing only on the narrative or visual content of a book and documenting the physical materials it’s made from, Drucker pushes us to consider how the maker’s interaction with a book’s physical materials during the making process and how future users respond to those material decisions shape how the book circulates knowledge in the world. For myself as a scholar and maker, one way to bring Drucker’s methodological approach to my analysis of Wise’s paper flower book is to think critically about the embodied performative engagements I was involved in earlier in the week when I was tasked with transforming my looking at a daffodil into a pencil sketch and finally into a print. While this was not the process that Wise herself was engaged in, it did raise the following question regarding the making of the paper flowers: How does cutting and layering paper render botanical specimens differently than cutting and removing rubber block material to create a print of the same specimen? Even though layering paper and removing rubber block can result in the same botanical image, each of these processes demand that the maker prioritize different physical aspects of the botanical specimen, move their body differently to manipulate materials, and conceptualize the process of bringing the image to life piece by piece or cut by cut.
Figure 5
As I continue to study Wise’s work, my answer to this question will heed art historian Jennifer Roberts’s call for material and visual culture scholars to undertake the making practices that bring to form the art or craft objects they study because it “allows us to form questions about processes that might otherwise have seemed invisible, inevitable, or self-evident.” These forays into the making world need not be professional, for, as Roberts also points out, scholars can learn a lot being challenged by experiments with skills that are unfamiliar. For myself at Oak Spring, as someone who has spent years learning and practicing letterpress printing, engraving, book arts, and papermaking, the sketch-to-print process was still incredibly challenging. For half an hour I kneeled on the brick pavers attempting to sketch the subtle curves of a pansy to no avail as my knees cramped before I could finish. And as I worked to carve a print of a lovely delicate clump of snowdrop flowers, I was stumped by my inability to manipulate the carving tool in the pliable rubber just so, to capture the snowdrops’ graceful arch. Each material test, however, was stimulating, ultimately leading me in a new creative direction. Now back at home in Sacramento, California, I’d like to channel Wise and start bringing my local gardens to life one paper cut out at a time.
Figure 6