Studies after Linnaeus

 

As you may remember from my last post I have been working rather frantically to make my new set of work for Rural Idyll 2, the exhibition at Little Dodnash Farm, Bentley, Suffolk, open during the weekends of Suffolk Open Studios. My new ideas are based around the work of Carl Linnaeus the Swedish botanist who created the system of binomial nomenclature (two Latin names, genus and species). He also put plants into family groups depending on the number of stamens(male sexual part) to pistil(female sexual part) in the flower of each plant. He described each family as a marriage, for instance a flower with three stamen he described as "Three husbands in the same marriage."

The compositions are made up of hand embroidery, buttons, knitted flowers and selections of fabrics.

I am still working on the piece below and I am intending to do one more flower study and an embroidery of the original drawing by Georg Ehret in Linnaeus' Systema Naturae when he published it in 1735 - a bit like a key to the rest of the work.