Botanique Artist Book
‘Stewart’s second botanically inspired volume, Botanique, is much smaller in scale, though equally substantial in its conceptual foundations. It is wholly remade from a small book of early nineteenth century botany found in a bin of discarded books in France. Titled Nouvelle Botanique, the schoolbook was intended to help identify specimens and included drawings of the leaves of Sage, Tilleul, Valérian, Verveine, Safron, and other herbs and plants. In the early nineteenth century, a significant number of citizens still lived in the country or in small towns. Students would have shared an intimate connection to the natural world around them, witnessing and acknowledging the subtle complexities of nature–weather, trees, plants, and animals. The original book is a touching document of that past.
Carefully deconstructing the original volume, Stewart used it as the template to meticulously reprint each page using cyanotype, a contact photographic process in which copies (or ‘blueprints’) of drawings or specimens can be made by placing them directly onto paper specially coated with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. The artist’s employment of cyanotype consciously acknowledges the historic innovation of Anna Atkins. The nineteenth century botanist saw the possibilities of the new technology for greater scientific accuracy in illustration. Her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843, was the first to be printed and illustrated using photographs. With its fusion of science and art, the publication broke ground in an era when science and art were more closely aligned than today.[i]’
Excerpt from A Botanist, an Architect, and a Garden by Jennifer Rudder
[i]The cyanotype has had a comeback recently within art galleries and museums. An exhibition in 2016 at Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts featured works by forty artists including those of Edward Steichen, Christian Marclay and Anna Atkins. Atkins’ works were on view in 2018 at the New York Public Library in the exhibition Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins.
