Morphology considers the construct of nature within science, art and language. In this pair of editioned prints and related monoprints, Taraxacum officinale is presented as a traditional botanical print made large and imposing. It no longer is a folio item for intimate study, in scale it has moved into the realm of painting, even though its marks and content still place it within the historical language of print. Similarly the traditional pattern derived from once scientific elements is a decorative sample made large, barely held within traditional print borders. It is science at once made domestic culture and contemporary boundary pushing print.

Taraxacum officinale is also positioned by botanical latin, an arbitrary construct introduced by Linnaeus in the 18th century to aid in the description of plants. Its use here suggests scientific/historic knowledge, and by extension, elevated value. But Taraxacum officinale is common Dandelion, a weed. Historically useful and found across the globe, it is described within today’s ‘natural’ value structure, not as successful immigrant, but as aggressive, noxious, invader. As in previous work, I ask What has value? What is kept? What truth remains?

In his book Compulsive Beauty Hal Foster discusses the surrealist gendering of interior architectural space as feminine and unconscious, a coding not new, but intensified by them. If historically women were trapped safely in the interior, men could also retreat from the exterior to the interior appropriating its conscious aspects for themselves. Foster might also argue that the use of the traditional print form may be read as a recovery of these obsolete cultural/scientific artifacts; perhaps it is a reference to the romantic ruin; the ruins of the bourgeoisie. Like Aragon writes in his 1926 Le Paysan de Paris, the use of the gampi tissue in A Morphology Naturalized may be read as an attempt at establishing a site for a “mythology of the modern” a place to expose the marvelous in “everyday existence”.
Foster also discusses the surrealist interest in outmoded objects (prints?) in terms of Walter Benjamin’s idea of an auratic object as one which appears to return our gaze and which may also retain marks of human labour. It has an intimate, subjective and historical dimension; it may recall the present to the past and the past to the present

A Morphology Naturalized (veil) is constructed from translucent gampi printed repeatedly in a floral pattern and scaled to drape through an interior. Its scale can be modified to accomodate each installation. The veil has a beauty that moves towards the marvelous as it convulses and appears to breathe as you do. It is tissue/veil printed repeatedly with dark representations of natural/history; it is dead but moves as alive. The veil shifts and sways from tradition to lyric to perhaps thoughtless richness and ruin. It contains elements of a formal morphology transformed into decorative language. It is an enormous print and an ephemeral sculpture. It is a botanical marvel; a familiar setting; a dandelion; a weed.