For the second brief, methods of cataloguing, I have chosen to work with one of the Harvard Digital Collections: Botanical Illustrations. The original collection consists of 4147 items, including paintings, drawings, and illustrations from the early 1800s to the mid-1900s. I have selected the first part of the collection featuring 82 plates with various plant hand illustrations.
The first week of the brief was about experimenting with the collection using different methods of cataloguing, such as: sorting, taxonomising, classifying, captioning, framing, recontextualising, adding, subtracting, stretching, compressing, hijacking, subverting, exaggerating, etc.
In my process, I first started by cutting out all the plant illustrations to make it easier to manipulate them and use them in my experiments. That was followed by sorting the plants into five colour groups and experimenting with the idea of using a single unit as a part of “mass” by layering the items.
I also focused on the shape of the bloom and identified four different sections represented by simple geometric shapes. For my second experiment, I used those shapes and masked them over the blooms of my chosen illustrations.
The third experiment focused on distorting & mirroring the plants, creating patterns from the illustrations, and giving them a new meaning and visual style.
Another experiment used the organic plant shapes to rearrange them on the canvas and give them a new context. I focused on the connection between those plants and us people, and through positioning, distorting, sizing and subtracting, I rearranged the collection to create faces. However, I noticed that this experiment was not the right way to go, and I knew I wouldn’t continue with its development.
The last experiment was hijacking the images, as I noticed a lot of the blooms looked like faces or had humane features; I focused on that connection and illustrated simple faces onto the flowers.
