Ecogeographer

Colchicum Autumnale

dom — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:04:57 +0000

This time last year I was working
on the below illustration
for a cancer theme and in memory
of my granny Whisker.

Colchicum autumnale finished
section by Dominica Williamson

This year I am in the midst of creating my first very own studio and so painting is on hold.
However, I’ve just finished a glass commission and about to take on another. I can work without a studio at present because I am working with people who cut glass connected to computers – so from your file. I’ve worked with stain glass and lead in the past and a bit of acid but this is etching with machines. Benjamin eat your heart out – it’s my botanical work becoming mechanised.

Publications about theirwork

dom — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:36:21 +0000

There’s been new interest in the project theirwork recently as well as my general practice.
Here’s a couple of publications about theirwork and a blog post written by Emmet – co-developer. (I am up-dating the theirwork blog next month so I will make a new link to it later.)

Chapter in Rethinking Maps:
New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory by Routledge editor Martin Dodge (I will put up the intro to the book sometime; the rest of the chapters you have to get from the book in print, which will be in all good libraries with a geography section.)

Article in Fourth Door Review:
This is available in print too. Ask me if you can’t get hold of it and I will point you.

Emmet Connolly’s blog post about the publications at time of sign off!

Catmint’s glandular hairs

dom — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:04:35 +0000

A peltate glandular trichome

A forest of glandular and non-glandular hairs (trichomes) cover the catmint leaves that I am painting. I am painting the glandular hairs in detail for the Eden Project Florilegium archive so that in the future the work can be used to educate children about why cats love this plant and why it is of ethnobotanical importance to humans.

The hair that is important to cats and humans is the peltate glandular trichome – the small mushroom shaped object. It looks like a satellite station under the microscope – it is quite yellow compared to the long horn like hairs. This is because the trichome is turgid – there is content, it has its cellular contents intact (slime, water, and protein)… When cats rub against the plant, terpene, a chemical mixture gets released and sends them into heaven. (More details about this later.)

These glandular trichomes are microscopic and so I needed the botanist Dr Alistair Griffiths to help me find them. The above image he took summarizes our findings. The non-glandular hairs are rather easier to find and I’ve been looking at these at various different magnification levels whilst drawing, painting and taking snapshots of them.

Snapshot of non-glandular catmint trichomes

As I enter into the winter, I will get into the intricacies of painting this whole plant. I will be working with dusty green and purple mixes of paint (my specimen has purple flowers). I will post some water colour details in the future.

Notes:
Alistair Griffiths is Horticultural Science Curator at the Eden Project

We used the below as our main reference:
Catnip, Nepeta cataria, a Morphological Comparison of Mutant and Wild Type Specimens to Gain an Ethnobotanical Perspective
Scott Herron
Department of Biological Sciences, Ferris State University, 820 Campus Dr. ASC 2012, Big Rapids, MI 49307-2225; herrons@ferris.edu

White, Goose, Storm (observing)

dom — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:19:10 +0000

Pete Postlethwaite is sending an arrow through my heart. Romeo and Juliet, The Age of Stupid and Brassed off, in that order, keep running round my head. Not the New Year I had expected. To me it feels a slow year to get started. It’s been a cold white winter with some snow and an ever present frost that’s been drilling down to my herbs. My New Year plan was to set in some kind of ‘freeze’, my own personal green audit framework. I’ve been languishing instead. Not only because of the loss of Pete Postlethwaite on our theatre and TV platforms, but I’ve also been mourning the loss of our new gander on the garden stage. Only three, he was found dead one morning by my mum. A heart attack, maybe a weak heart because he was a runt. He was our first all white gander and had a high pitch gorgeous chime of a call (he was called Sarah!) I recorded the loss of the grey gander here.

I’ve been observing a white and pink plant this winter. The white of plants is a chalky white says Derek Jarmen*, and chalky white is great as it’s a warm white and so plants even if white, warm you… My granny Whisker (yes, that’s her real name) died of leukaemia, and Colchicum autumnale, Autumn Crocus is linked to some treatment associated with this disease, and so I choose to observe and paint it. It’s dedicated to her; she fired my imagination with poetry, gardens she themed for each one of my family, and unseen fairies that left presents on each of the Irish east coast sea shelled mornings.

On January 18, 2008, the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (representing botanic gardens in 120 countries) stated that “400 medicinal plants are at risk of extinction, from over-collection and deforestation, threatening the discovery of future cures for disease”. These included yew trees (the bark is used for cancer drugs, paclitaxel); Hoodia (from Namibia, source of weight loss drugs); half of Magnolia species (used as Chinese medicine for 5,000 years to fight cancer, dementia and heart disease); and Autumn Crocus (for gout).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, March 2001

Leukaemia has been successfully treated with Autumn Crocus, and the plant has also been used with some success to treat Bechet’s syndrome, a chronic disease marked by recurring ulcers and leukaemia.
From Plants For a Future

Colchicum autumnale observational work (and further above, Gilbert & George Gorse Hearts by Dominica Williamson)

As I came into February, I started studying the leaves of this plant. Appropriately, they have a sheen and stand strong. Valentine’s day approached at this time, and so Romeo and Juliet came back, swimming through my head, Baz Luhrmann’s fast flying cuts swirling round, Pete’s wisdom was in front of me again. Arr, the Age of Stupid, yes, he would want me to stop languishing and get an audit framework started and to keep observing more and more. And my boyfriend must have felt that too, cos here’s a washed up badger brush from the tideline, which saved him £40 and answered my prayers about not buying badger but wanting quality and a girl’s version. And so the audit starts with a cold white winter behind me, but a warm white soul and a new green way to shave.

My boyfriend found, painted and photographed the brush

*Nearly all white flowers are yellowish white and the comparatively few that are bluish white such examples as Omphalodes linifolia are of a texture so different from snow that one cannot compare them at all – I should say that most white flowers are near the colour of chalk; for although the words chalky white have been used in a rather contemptuous way, the colour is really a beautiful warm white, but by no means an intense white.

Derek Jarman, Chroma, p16

Disposable Cup – add to the collection!

dom — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:07:54 +0000

If you want to add a cup to ‘my disposable cup collection’, you can!

Go to the photo sharing site Flickr.

If you’re not signed up, go do it now. It’s free, easy and great.

Here’s some of my cup collection on my Flickr space http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecogeographer

If you upload a cup to your own space, you can then quickly add it to the Disposable Cup Group http://www.flickr.com/groups/disposablecup.

One day your cup will appear here http://disposablecup.org.

This is going to be a site where the cups will get showcased and information about disposable cups will get in-putted, like how to reduce disposable cup usage.

Any questions, please ask.

Oh, I am going to offer a postal service soon, so if someone doesn’t want to photograph and use Flickr and so forth, they can just send me the cup, and I will do the rest.

More information about my disposable cup collection coming soon, but for the moment, I leave you with this -

Morning, rush, fix, dash, sit…
Morning, drive, shop, drink, eat, throw…
Approach, choose, buy, drink, leave behind…walk away.
Journey, thirst, drink, boredom, hungry, eat…discard.

Drinking from the world – cup exhibition

dom — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 22:05:22 +0000

Over a year ago I presented ‘my disposable cup collection’ to a community in Northern Denmark at Vendsyssel Museum of Art. I did it by way of slides and set the collection within the rest of my practice. Today marks a turning point for the collection, an exhibition of my cups in real-time space opens at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indiana, in the Basile Gallery.

I shipped the cups, about 600, to the school last week and have frantically been working to get them online at the same time, whilst Matt Groshek, Public Scholar at the school (Exhibition Planning and Design) has been frantically installing them in the actual space. We’ve got lots of stuff to share about the exhibition, but for the moment, here’s one of the cups in the show – I call it The Tulip Cup.

Date found: 2003-2004
Location: New York
Found by: Dominica Williamson
Contents: None
Tag line: None
Manufacturer: USA, L.K. rest illegible
Material: Wax coated paper
Height: 7.5cms
Personal code: _MG_1083
Main colour: Purple

Yellow, Sun, Winter (painting)

dom — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:29:48 +0000

It’s winter.
I am currently painting in a land that is winter yellow; Cornwall. It is surrounded by harsh explosive yellow gorse, then shades of yellow daffodils, prissy pale primroses, followed by powdery yellow willow.
I’m finishing a willow dissection, which harbours a gorgeous squat yellowy glistening nectary.
But first showing here is European Gorse dissected. The Gorse gave me beautiful objects to paint. I know Derek Jarman would appreciate them, especially the above detail.
The mechanical hinge of the keel is illustrated below.

…its five petals form the keel, wings and standard – the wings and keel interlocking. If we carefully dissect a flower we can see at the base of each half of the keel a great tooth, and a similar one at the base of each wing, by which the interlocking is effected. We further discover that all the stamens are here joined into a tube round a minute pod; they are monodelphous – “in one brotherhood” – say the botanists.*

Plant family: Fabaceae
Plant genus: Ulex
Plant species: U. europaeus
Plant cultivar: NA
Held: Eden Project Florilegium
Artist: Dominica Williamson

A friend and colleague, Matt Groshek, remarked, ‘Your work is reminding me of Jarman’. The last year I had periodically clutched his Garden book. It must have seeped in. I hadn’t realised.
Jarman would look at this not only for its form, he would wonder at the colour. It would take him to Prospect Cottage. It’s yellow window frames and the very way he framed the house with Gorse.

‘The milk-white sap bleeds, the yellow flowers turn brown in death.’
‘Daffodil yellow. Primrose yellow. The Yellow Rose of Texas. Canary bird.’
‘Spring comes with celandine and daffodil. The yellow rape sends the bees dizzy. Yellow is a difficult colour, fugitive as mimosa that sheds its dusty pollen as the sun sets.’
Yellow Lines the Kerbside. Yellow earth-moving equipment with flashing yellow lights, cutting a wound in the landscape.
excerpts from Jarman’s Chroma 1994

And it’s Matt who indirectly, through Leslie, took me to the Yellow Wallpaper. What a book. I think it’s because it shows the two extremities of the colour in huge depth – the two polar opposites of what the colour can do. Life and joy versus death and despair – summer versus winter. And now I am thinking of Jarman again.

Yellow has long been my favourite colour, and I am sure always will. (I believe it is Leslies too.)

* Quote taken from Knolik

European Gorse – coconut heaven

dom — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:04:18 +0000

When I last blogged it was Winter and I was surrounded by the coconut scent of European Gorse. Now it’s Summer (in blog land, that’s oh dear where have I been). I am about to embark on painting Western Gorse’s summer yellow haze, and very soon, more words (and probably images) on Winter, Summer and Gorse will follow and you’ll see why I’ve been gone so long.

LABEL

Plant family: Fabaceae
Plant genus: Ulex
Plant species: U. europaeus
Plant cultivar: NA

Accession Number: NA
Location: Saint Ewe hedge, Heligan, Cornwall
Lat & Long: 50.29002 -4.81941
Personal Reference: SUB1/1-09

Held: Eden Project Florilegium Archive
Artist: Dominica Williamson

theirwork in Tornby

dom — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:16:26 +0000

The project theirwork travelled to Northern Denmark this Summer to walk and map with a community in the town of Tornby. Over the Winter I am working to visualize and record the results of the walks for the community. They can then use them as mapping tools, and so can carry on to map in my absence. As a starter, here are the GPS track lines of their walks.

In my herb garden this year: Part two

dom — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:47:51 +0000

Carry on imagining the ellipse walked in part one, you got half way round, the chamomile bench was your rest point… you landed on the south side of the curve…

Leading from the Chamomile bench: dry sunny bed
Thymus Magic Carpet Magic Carpet Thyme, French Tarragon Artemisia dracunculus, Lemon Grass Cymbopogon citratus, Hyssop (white flowered) Hyssopus officinalis, Betony (white flowered) Stachys officinalis, Tree Spinach Chenopodium giganteum, Chicory Cichorium intybus, Anise Hyssop Agastache foeniculum, Red Chicory Cichorium intybus, Lavender Kew Red Lavandula stoechas, Garlic Chives Allium tuberosum, Clary Sage Salvia sclarea, Cat Mint Nepeta cataria (I think), Garlic Chives Allium tuberosum, Borage Borago officinalis, Camphor Plant Balsamita major tomentosum, Bergamot Monarda, Evening Primrose Oenothera biennis L., Feverfew (Golden?) Chrysanthemum parthenium, Lemon Balm Melissa officinalis, Majoram Gold Tipped Origanum vulgare, Common Thyme Thymus vulgaris, St. Johns Wort Hypericum perforatum, Salad Burnet Sanguisorba minor

Arching from the Mint seat: wet to dry bed
Goats Rue (white flowered) Galega officinale, Eau de Cologne Mentha x piperata f. citrata, Wild Rocket Eruca vesicaria, Corsican Mint Mentha requienii, Black Horehound Ballota nigra, Tree Onion Allium cepa proliferum group, Jacobs Ladder (white flowered) Polemonium caeruleum, Land Cress Barbarea verna, Wild Rocket Eruca vesicaria, Lemon Mint Mentha sp, Marsh Mallow Althea officinalis, Vietnamese Coriander Persicaria odorata, Celery Leaf Apium graveolens, Black Horehound Ballota nigra (potted), Fennel Foeniculum vulgar, Flat Leaved Parsley Petroselinum crispum, Evening Primrose (need to track the name of this type)

The north curve again, at the black buttress: dry hot bed
Wood Sage Teucrium scorodonia, Golden Marjoram Origanum vulgare, Tea Tree Melaleuca (I think), Golden Feverfew Tanacetum parthenium aureum, Welsh Onion Allium fistulosum, Thyme Russetings Thymus serpyllum ‘Russettings’ (potted), White Horehound Marrubium vulgare, Sage Salvia officinalis (need to move this), Mace Myristica fragrans, Lemon Verbena Aloysia triphylla, Pot Marigold Calendula officinalis (potted)

You’re back at the beginning, at the bottom of the steps, Tea Plant Camellia Sinensis (potted)

What I lost this year (and what the geese ate)
White Borage Borago officinalis ‘Alba’, Chocolate Mint Mentha x piperita f. citrata, (think I’ve just got a Peppermint of this) Sweet Rocket Hesperis matronalis, Sweet marjoram Za’atar Origanum, Lovage Levisticum officianle, Bush Basil Ocimum basilicum ‘Marseillais’, Dark Opal Basil Ocimum basilicum ‘Purpurascens’, Cinnamon Basil Ocimum basilicum