It showed me how tough and tenacious nature is, which I found comforting,” she says. “It seemed to encapsulate everything I wanted to express. At art school, Rachel found her voice when she drew on a childhood memory of throwing a handful of melon seeds down the bathroom sink, only to discover, some weeks later, plants growing up through the overflow. They reflect Rachel’s interest in nature, its transience and tenacity. There is a memorial as well as a celebratory quality to these simple tiles and panels, for they preserve a fleeting moment of glory long after the plants have faded and died. Pendulous bleeding hearts, curly fiddleheads of ferns, and wispy poppies are some of her favorite flowers to cast. Her composition can be as simple as a single stem or as complex as a field of wildflowers, leaves, and grasses. In a similar vein, Rachel Dein makes plaster casts of plants and flowers that record all their texture, pattern, and delicacy in exquisite details. In the resulting images, fine botanical details are meticulously rendered with a slightly raised texture, bringing them alive on the page. The fine grooves in the lead hold the ink, which is then transferred onto paper through a press. Auer’s innovative technique involved pressing the plants onto a thin, soft lead plate to make an intaglio impression.
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In the nineteenth century a young British printer named Henry Bradbury, borrowing techniques developed by the Austrian printer Alois Auer, published his most famous book, The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. Early botanists used nature printing to record the plants they collected and to share information about new discoveries in faraway places.
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Leonardo da Vinci described the process in his Codice Atlantico of 1508, illustrating with a singular print of a sage leaf, its stem, mid-rib, veins, and curved edge standing out in vivid details. Rachel’s work evolved from the old tradition of nature printing, the technique of using the surface of a natural object to make a print. The representation of nature has been the province of artists since the late Minoan painters and potters decorated palace walls and pottery with lilies, saffron, and other flowers thousands of years ago. In the light-filled attic studio at her north London home, the artist Rachel Dein gently peels back a clay mold to reveal a plaster cast of flowers in amazing details and extraordinary beauty.