Plants, Botanical Printing and Time

 

Time was, once upon a time, in another time and place. . . .limitless.  There was plenty of it.  Days lasted forever.  Eons passed between one Christmas and another.  Turning 16 seemed out of reach…too far into the future to even imagine.  Our culture has developed an entire vernacular dealing with time.  We ask questions about it.  Ponder it.  Is time a circular expanse or a linear continuum?  A human construct, a tool?  Relative or fixed?  We say there’s never enough time.  Too much time.  It moves too fast, too slow.   And always it remains an illusive quicksilver river ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of the universe.  A phenomena that seems so important yet still and always out of our grasp.  Like a high flying lightening bug.  Now you see it now you don’t.  And you’ll never catch it.

I don’t know why I got off on this tangent.  My intention was simply to post images of five garments I made recently.  Printed with leaves.  Botanical prints.  But when I look at them, I realize they represent time…or at least a particular moment in time.  A time in spring when fresh green and fresh tannin bursts forth after a long dormant period.  They’re fossils to me.  Captured images.  A likening of how it was in a certain moment, in a particular woodland, on just such a day in a predictable season.  In this country on this earth in this solar system nestled in a galaxy spinning in a colossal mind-boggling universe that once upon a time exploded into being.  This is why I love botanical printing.  It captures a moment in time, embodying the fleeting, transient nature of existence.