A Personal Herbarium

Collage

In the impulse "A Walk in the Forest" I encouraged you to collect and press leaves or flowers or other plant parts to use them for collages. And then, in the impulse “A personal herbarium” you already got to try a simple collage. Now I’d like to talk about the different techniques of collage, their possibilities and versatility. I want to introduce the concept. Collage is a technique that originated in the visual arts. You apply several found pieces of paper onto a canvas or piece of paper to create a new image. The word itself comes from the French "coller" meaning "to glue", and "la colle", which means “glue”, as the technique glues things onto a surface. The collage is of course not only relevant for the visual arts, but later also in literature and the performing arts. There are text collages, music collages, theater collages, film collages, or even text-image collages, as for example by the famous author Herta Müller.

In the Forest

There’s a magic in every beginning. It’ a wonderful energy to start something new. To start a new chapter, a new theme, a new idea, something that wasn't there before. There's a great power in that, in that newness, that unprecedentedness, and that's what we're starting with today. We’re now in this wonderful season of autumn. The colored leaves may have already fallen to the ground in great numbers, and yet autumn is a delight. Maybe the snow is already in the air, and you can literally smell it.

A Personal Herbarium

In the last impulse "A Walk in the Forest" I encouraged you to collect and press leaves and other plant parts. You can now use these pressed parts to make collages with natural objects from the realm of plants. The practice of pressing and drying plants is an old one. The oldest surviving herbarium dates back to as early as the 16th century (1524). It’s located in Kassel, Germany. Originally, people dried plants to have decorative material in winter. That’s how the tradition of the herbarium began. Over time, people realized that they could do this with all sorts of plants and that they could systematize the herbarium and add the roots, the buds, the flower heads, and the fruits. They became scientific works. Nowadays there are herbaria worldwide, most of them in Europe and North America. Often, they can be found in botanical gardens or natural history museums. The largest herbaria are in Paris, St. Petersburg, London, St. Louis, Vienna (they were established mainly in the times of the monarchy) and in Berlin.

Light breaking through spirals

This time there are two tasks. The subject is still the spiral. We’ll stay with the spiral, it’s too good to let it go already. But the theme becomes a little more concrete: the spiral as light. You’ll approach it as follows: First, you draw a square on your drawing sheet. With a ruler. And within this square, you draw a spiral. It has one line. Only one line. Then you go into the square with a color of your choice, it can be black ink, or another tint, or charcoal or pencil or ballpoint pen. You go into the square with small strokes, which then blur into a surface, so even that only the line remains white. The background becomes dark. The spiral remains in the white of the drawing sheet. And then you confine this line as close as possible. You must frame the line from the left and the right with the color until only the spiral remains free. It would be nice if your square was quite large for the line to have enough space in it and so that you have room to go in between the lines of the spiral with your color. This is the first exercise.

A Walk in the Forest

This time there are again two tasks connected with each other. For this I ask you to go out into nature. Go for a walk. With open eyes. The first task is to look for leaves and other parts of plants from meadows or the wayside, which you can take home with you to press them. They can be grasses, leaves or delicate flowers, just not plants that are too thick. Lay these leaves flat between sheets of newspaper or kitchen rolls, they absorb the moisture particularly well. The leaves should not touch each other, leave plenty of room between them. When you have prepared all the collected plants in this way, weigh them down with books or other heavy objects so that they are flattened. This will take a few days.