Ocean Flowers

Impressions from Nature

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Edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine De Zegher

Princeton University Press

Due/Published April 2004, 272 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691119481

Ocean Flowers explores a little-known moment of artistic experimentation. It focuses on natural-history imagery in the mid-nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on botanical drawings and photograms by the artist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) and her Victorian contemporaries.

Besides presenting 200 color plates, the book illuminates shifts in the way the natural world was represented. In the mid 1800s, the advent of photography provided new possibilities, generating as much creative fervor as digital media have in recent years. In addition to hand-made drawings, hand-colored prints, nature prints (direct imprints from plants), and natural illustrations (real specimens mounted on the page), artists began making photogenic drawings (as William Henry Fox Talbot first dubbed his early photographs) to record botanical specimens. A kind of "drawing with light," this new art form complemented, rather than superceded, the other forms of graphic media. Far from rendering conventional approaches obsolete, it encouraged experimentation with all kinds of media.

Ocean Flowers demonstrates how this concept of "fluidity" in crossing the traditional borders between media is paralleled in the contemporary art world. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Drawing Center in New York City in association with the Yale Center for British Art. More than just an exhibition catalog, it includes essays by the coeditors, as well as by the artist Craigie Horsfield and scholars Edward Eigen, Elaine Scarry, and Kathryn Tuma.