Author: Flora Eloise Grosvenor-Stevenson

I collected things like sticks and rainwater, and I used rubbings of leaves and bark. The drawings in my sketchbook, on the left, are done with chalk, pastel and rubbings- on a leaf and a tree. The drawing on the right is drawn with a sharpened stick, rainwater and charcoal ink. I thought this would be useful for my thinking, however I actually found it limiting. Again, I decided to break up my practise here and stop illustrating to re-root the work. 

So I made this book. I collect images all the time, often of examples of human-centric nature, such as weeds growing through a pavement or a tree growing through a fence. I randomly placed all of these images into a document and the weird layouts and messy pages made me think about chaos in nature which took my thought process to plant hybrids.

Over summer I took my sketchbook with me everywhere. I started loosely and quickly illustrating and taking notes of the things I saw around me. I feel that drawing in situ really helps me engage with the subject in a way that taking a photo doesn’t.  This carried on for the whole of summer, some of the drawings were successful and some of them were less so but all of them were useful in taking my thinking further on the subject of human interaction with nature. Taking in some human elements such as the umbrella or the wall was also quite interesting to me. I started writing on the bottom of the images to help engage the audience and create a narrative with the illustrations. So my broader line of inquiry at this point was still how do humans interact with nature, which made me question my own interactions with nature. I was reading and watching a lot of David Hockney interviews and I found the way he speaks about looking and drawing particularly exciting. With the aim to carry on really looking and illustrating I wanted to see how I could use nature as a tool and device within my practise. So the next step for me here was wanting to use nature as a medium.

This is the self portrait I ended up with. A little plant/ human hybrid sitting down.

During my surgery recovery I couldn’t really move much, which I suppose is to be expected when you’ve had your torso cut open. Also my moods were super up and down with lots of emotions etc. etc. etc. But I did manage to make a few drawings in my little sketchbook. I changed my medium, I didn’t really want to be drawing intricate things with a black pen anymore, I wanted to be making things that expressed how I was feeling, which quite frankly was really terrible and the surgery for me had been quite trauma inducing so I had a few things to figure out here. It was helpful so it was successful, I needed to make these drawings to be able to move forward with my work. I don’t like the pieces, they make me feel sad but I am glad that I made them.

I enjoyed the looseness of the oil pastel I had used in my sketchbook so I wanted to set the tightness of the previous illustration free, I drew over it with the loose oil pastels, ending that section of this project, breaking my practise and allowing it to move forward with a new intention. I wanted get far away from the introverted self-reflective illustrations and explore how I could create a narrative with plant characters. Important to note I also wanted to escape anthropomorphising them. My broader enquiry became about questioning the interaction between humans and nature and how I could use nature representation to investigate that relationship. 

Using different methods of drawing like, ink, oil pastel, colouring crayon, pencil and chalk meant I could quickly document ideas. I set myself some rules like not taking the pen off the paper and giving myself time limits on the sketches.

These animations are both works in progress to see how I could develop the plant/human characters and what kind of narratives I could create with them. Animation is a new tool for me so it can take quite a lot of time. I enjoy making the different frames, however to communicate what I wanted to with these I struggled with time limits.

The character in both of them, the same as with the 100 screen grabs, is a self portrait and reflects my feelings to an illness I have and will be having surgery for shortly. I realise that this work isn’t accessible because I am reluctant to talk about the issue at hand.

100 somethings in a week is a lot of somethings. I looked over my elaborate project and took inspiration from an animation I made from collaged drawings. It was several different parts of plants that made a character who moves in a peculiar way. The petals fold and hide the middle section. I enjoyed the strange movements and that the plant took on a personality and character, this is why I began adding further elements to plant drawings and let them evolve into their own characters.

In my one hundred screen grabs project I made digital and physical illustrations of anthropomorphic plants and created texts from note taking and stream of conscious writing. Taking reference from the surrealist method of automatic drawing, I created one hundred illustrations without putting emphasis on the meaning or overthinking. It was a visual exercise and creating these iterations allowed for my thinking and work to move forward out of its comfort zone and into something more exciting. The form the characters have taken are a self portrait for example the sunflower with hobbit feet draws reference from memories and different symbolic moments in my life. The duality of the illustrations seems important for allowing the project to grow. The cheese-plants probably come from the fact that my cheese-plant takes over my house and wont stop growing, I think this is an interesting personal lens to look through at the start of this project. 

The overarching interest in my works is nature and how humans interact with it. The misunderstanding, the disconnect, the ignorance and/or the naivety. My position as a creative exploring these themes is not as someone who has the answers, I don’t have the ability to transcend language and understand plants in any way other than as a human. My position therefore is that of a researcher exploring how I can use design tools to begin to unpack this complex topic. 

I will be using illustration and animation to progress this project further. Considering how different elements of the illustrations create duality and how the pairing of human and plant parts opens a further conversation. I think testing different styles and exploring the ambiguity of the characters created in the screen grabs in relation with written elements from my note-taking exercises will lead to further questions and iterations by creating a new dialogue and environment. I am interested in the way text and image is discussed in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, in Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage how the exploration of how message can change though medium. How Jenny Holzer’a application of found text to subvert or alter the meaning of the words and how she cleverly investigates this through her work. There are several essays from Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World that discuss topics aligned with the initial prompt. 

Brief

Moving away from self- reflective illustrations and using ‘nature’, specifically plants as a prompt, reflect on the illustrations in the 100 iterations project explore how illustration, animation and note-taking can take this work into new territory and how the different media impacts the message.

My practise usually involves using nature and plant elements as a visual tool to explore a variety of different questions. I used a small sketchbook to draw the 100 illustrations and all of them are made just using a black ink pen. I think creating this many iterations in such a short time scale is difficult but also extremely rewarding and helpful in providing a break in practise. I realised in this project I used illustrations of the anthropomorphic plant creatures as a way of expressing my feelings at the time so they ended up being self reflective and as a result the work feels introverted. I had no initial intention with this work, as I had no way of knowing the direction it would go. Aesthetically when the images are presented together I find it unsuccessful due to the fact that the different parts don’t speak to each other and no narrative is created.