Never Say Never

Detail of a cyanotype print using blackberry leaves as a stencil

I always swore I would never make ‘botanical’ prints, ie cyanotype prints using flowers or leaves as the stencil motifs. Yet I found myself doing exactly that at my residency at Oak Hill Gallery in Mornington.

It was all because of the blackberries I discovered rambling out the back in a corner of the garden. It was so unusual to find them growing wild between the structured rose gardens adjacent to the gallery and the driveway. Yet there they were, a bit picked over by the birds, but nevertheless so identifiable. All the prickles and serrated edges of the leaves but oh how yummy the taste and memories of blackberry jam.

To me the blackberries screamed “you are back in the state of Victoria” like nothing else did. They took my thoughts straight back to our little farm in the Victorian High Country which was all bush and blackberries. At that time in the 1980s, I was reading Bill Mollison’s permaculture books where you design your living around your chosen site.

That meant we had to think of several uses for this noxious weed. How to control it without resorting to poison. Hence the arrival of our farm animals - bees and goats. The bees made tasty honey from the blackberry flowers and the goats kept the blackberries managable. We found ourselves living in the land of milk and honey!

So when I saw the blackberry bush in Mornington I knew I had to honour its place in my life. I picked some blackberries to eat and brought a couple into the studio room where I was working. The juice got onto some tissue paper and stained it a luscious pink.I started squishing it on some cyanotype prints and it turned purple. A whole new colour range ensued.

I had never really embraced ‘eco-printing’ or plant based dyes yet when I got home I found that there are many artists who have experimented with alternative photographic methods using plant based chemicals for developing and fixing. Traditional silver nitrate based photography has so many issues around ecological disposal of chemicals used in the darkroom.

With artists turning their attention to ecologically sound art practices, I now want to find out more. For the past few years I have been using cyanotype and argyrotype solutions for sun based photographic exposures as a replacement to needing a full darkroom to make prints. Now the humble blackberry has led me on a quest to discover more about plant based alternative photographic methods. Who knows where this will lead.

Blackberries staining tissue paper pink

Blackberry plants as cyanotype print stencils