from here to here to here

Having gone back to some old photographic processes, in the need to work with my hands more again. I collected some old napkins and a book on foraging called A forager's treasury - A New Zealand guide to finding and using wild plants by Johanna Knox. It got me thinking how we have lost so much of our knowledge of food, what to eat. The relationship we have between edible plants and ourselves has broken down. We now trust too much in the giant supermarket pantries to provide us with our daily bread. Believing that they know best of what we should eat. Actually they are only really the presenter of food (what used to be our back yard or forrest we foraged in), this food is produced by other large 'factories/laboratories'. Concocted often rather than grown.

Earlier in my research I discovered that 80% of the food we now eat comes from one of 7 food sources (wheat, rice, maize/corn, potatoes, barley, cassara/tapioca, sorghum). How have we managed to get so reliant on others for our food? Industrialisation for one, shoving more people into cities, on smaller plots of land, so that they can go to the factories in which our 'food' is not produced and packaged. (a whole different topic all together). The rise of the farmers market is making some amends to this loss of knowledge. However many farmers markets still have a long way to go, as product presented there is often just a replica of what a supermarket offers. Anyway back to the napkins........My thoughts were to use old and new napkins. Old napkins I will be using old photographic process of Cyanotype and Van Dijk . On the new ones I want to screen print imagery. Painting the chemicals on the napkin and then using the wild edible plants on the old napkins, so going from here: plain white   to here: cyanotypethen to maybe to here, this en masse on the floor: group of lilies     not sure about this direction yet, but is one angle am following. Yes it may appear to be crafty (have had that before) but until have satifisfied this idea, will follow it through. Maybe even organize a dinner where I feed all foraged foods???  

Posted by Elle Anderson

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