"It's the inconvenient truth that women have always been fifty percent of the population, but only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history." -- Dr. Bettany Hughs, British historian
I began working on Attributed - Field Studies in the Spring of 2023. Generally, my work reflects my interest in my environment, land stewardship, and the climate crisis. Through repetitive image-making I document and observe the changes to the overlapping layers of human and natural histories embedded in the landscape.
I have lived and worked on the Toronto Islands all my life, exploring and documenting this urban park. Toronto Island is a constructed environment that includes formal gardens, fields, wetlands, and forest, all manicured for the park user. Currently and over the last two decades, there has been a movement away from formal landscaping in favour of a more naturalized environment. The Island is a unique landscape that includes a residential community that is over one hundred years old. In the 1950s, many of the houses were removed to create more parkland. These old gardens are part of the landscape, creating many layers of plant life that include native plants, and the traces of the old residential gardens that return every year.
In these images, I am re-imagining the history of botanical paintings made by women of the Victorian era, who were relegated to an artistic practice close to home. Social pressure prohibited painting on-site and women were deemed too frail for travel. As a result, women turned to their gardens or the countryside they knew well for subject material. They would often plant and nurture foliage seasonally to broaden their selection. As a result, many of these women were constructing a rich history of the flora in the areas where they worked. In their lifetimes, their work was overlooked as "busy women's work" or attributed to their male peers -- often a spouse or son would put their signature on the work. Many of these stories and women are just recently being added to the history of art.
This work represents the beginning of my exploration as I honour these women before me. My images include a mix of native plants and ornamentals, annuals and perennials. I plan to work through categories of plants photographically, with the intention of recording and cataloging as I reinterpret this material. I am developing categories that parallel how specimens are labeled and stored in herbariums and other plant collections. Rather than botanical, these categories appear arbitrary or based on the gatherers' interests and access to material. This is an echo of the women who produced early botanical art works. As with most of my work, Attributed strives to question what is 'wild', and how we are renegotiating our relationship with our environment, demonstrating how nature is reinvented with our help.
These works are editions of three with one artist proof, printed on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta Satin paper. Prints are in three formats depending on the foliage, and print sizes vary with formatting -- in most cases the prints are image size 16" x 20" or 20" x 24"
