Orchidomania
In 2015, while visiting JDL’s estate Penllergare, we saw the ruins of his orchid house and heard of his fascination for Orchidaceae. From a 2006 transcript of a talk to the Orchid Study Group of the National Botanic Garden of Wales as well as reading JDL’s correspondence in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we identified many orchids that JDL cultivated. For example, Bollea violacea was the inspiration for JDL’s orchid house. In a letter dated 1849, JDL wrote that he was experiencing a bout of ‘orchidomania’. This obsession inspired the title of our series.
JDL and his family experimented with photography including the production of clichés verre; a 19th century technique that combines drawing or painting with photography. After researching contemporary and historic examples of clichés verre, we made tests using black ink and acrylic painted onto acetate or glass and then applied pressed orchids or etched directly into the substrate to create a negative from which to make a photographic print. Our experiments evolved to prints in the analogue darkroom from translucent film sheets overlaid and mis-registered in both the enlarger and in contact with the paper. This advance, also rooted in the photogram process, came through working with a master printer at the Arts Institute, University of Cumbria in Carlisle.
Having selected certain prominent orchids grown by JDL, including Phalaenopsis amabilis which is widely available in supermarkets, we sourced online, low resolution images of the blooms and digitally manipulated them to create ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ files. These files were subsequently printed onto colour separation film. Re-combining the positive and negative film sheets in the darkroom to make black and white fibre prints resulted in work with an unforeseen richness and subtlety despite the crude starting materials. The representation of the flowers as 12” x 16” photographs that are at once intimate and recognisable, yet strangely three-dimensional, devoid of intense impressions like colour, offers an uncanny interplay between what is real and unreal. This resonates with our fascination about perceptions surrounding the natural world and the transformative power of art and nature.
The starting point for the wallpaper was knowing that Emma Thomasina Talbot, JDL’s wife, was a competent and published botanical illustrator. We therefore researched Curtis’ Botanical Magazines in the British Library from the mid-1800s and found in some of these beautiful periodicals, lithographs of orchids from Penllergare. Assuming the original drawings were possibly by Emma, we selected two illustrations to form a design screen printed onto black wallpaper. The wallpaper plays on bringing ‘the outside in’ and vice versa as the Dillwyn Llewellyn family often brought interior objects and furnishings outside to harness available light for their photographic tableaux.
Our experimental, collaborative process echoes the cooperation of JDL and his family in making photographs. Orchidomania also has connections with our independent bodies of work, for example, the use of the flower motif.
Medium:
Silver gelatin prints
Dimensions:
12 by 16 inches
Edition Sizes:
3