Nestled in the bowels of the Olin-Kroch Library complex is one of my favorite gallery spaces: the Hirshland Gallery in the Rare and Manuscript Collection. This academic year, the gallery features the exhibition "Plant Based: Botanical Innovations From Paper to Poison." The library describes: “The artifacts gathered in this exhibition demonstrate the essential role plants have played in human communication, health, clothing, and design across the ages, showing that the phrase ‘plant based’ can apply to much more than food and diet. Plant Based explores multiple dimensions of our varied interactions with plants, and celebrates the earth’s florae, their myriad uses, and the inspiration humanity has discovered in their bounty.”
"Plant Based" explores the way plants influence and are influenced by ways of making and seeing. In particular, it visualizes the dialectic between plants as medium (for example making up paper, ink, dyes, etc.) and plants as represented objects. These are not necessarily oppositions, as evidenced by cases like a woodcut where the plant constitutes the maker (wood, paper) and the represented (print of a plant). Rather, I think these objects give us a way to think about these dynamics of representation and grapple with the material properties of the things represented and representing.
The exhibition’s experience actually begins when you take the stairs down from the Olin/Kroch ground floor. Each landing features an enlarged page from an artist’s book that hints at what is below. On the top level is an enlarged page of cyanotypes from Laurie Sieverts Snyder’s Leaves and Stones; on the next is a page from Trisha Hammer and Audrey Niffenegger’s Poisonous Plants at Table depicting an Ides of Spring Party. This descent into the exhibition feels like a microcosm of the exhibition itself — literally moving from paper to poison.
The exhibition consists primarily of cases filled with books and objects, with each case centering around a function of plants in creating. The case closest to the entrance situates you at the beginning of the exhibition: paper, specifically paper-making. The poison section is at the back of the room, so that moving through the exhibition inevitably makes you move from paper to poison, which activates your physical body as a necessary part of the exhibition and also aids with experiencing the objects and their materials through imagining physical interactions.
I think my favorite display case is the one featuring woodcuts. I love looking at printing “plates,” seeing the dimensionality and imagining the process of impressing and carving out. But more so, I love that the case lays out the carved wood depicting plants next to the prints of said plants on plant-based paper. For me, it really gets at this dialectic of plants as the thing making up an art object but also as what is being represented, with both then situated into the larger history of printing.
I also love the case with cyanotypes and nature-printing, in part because I adore the ghostly qualities of cyanotypes. Nature-printing is done by pressing plants into soft lead, and then painting the impression that remains. Cyanotypes are made with UV-light sensitive paper; the plants are placed on the paper, and then everything around them is “developed” by sun exposure. And so in both of these cases, the physical plant essentially makes the piece, which really makes me think of the plant’s influence on making — how does the plant’s physical properties shape the way people can capture it and how it appears?
The exhibition does a stellar job drawing connections between objects and processes, as well as the continuous ways plants influence and are influenced by making processes. A taller case towards the back features the use and representation of plants in fashion and clothing. Floral fabrics for costume doll dresses are next to a reference book of dyes and a print depicting the harvesting plants used to create these dyes. As the description notes, plants are both used to make clothing through dyes and are often represented as motifs on clothing. The placement of these things together show the represented and representing processes overlap.
One of my favorite pieces featured is Aimee Lee’s Every Fall. The paper base mixes bark lace with traditional Korean paper making processes that use the mulberry tree. The description says that this use of medium evokes tactile experiences of visiting Korean burial grounds. Visually, the first thing I noticed was the roughness and texture, which creates a desire to touch and feel. I think the texture evokes the grounds themselves, and reaching out to touch becomes entangled with acts of burying. For me, this piece drags the history of the plant medium and the cultural history of certain practices together, enmeshing processes of making and experiencing with a larger history. Perhaps this piece embodies what I love most about the exhibition; It grapples with the questions: What history did the things constituting this object have? What knowledge is embedded within these representations of plants and processes? And what new life do plants take on in these transformations?
Pen Fang is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
