Mandy Bonnell
Bath, England
mandybonnell.com
Bethany Grasses
2019
etching, collage letterpress, and letterpress
5″ each single width page x 13″ height/length
Artist Statement
The work is a folio/book that was developed following a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, where I drew plants and moss growing around the Albers’ Foundation studio in Connecticut. This formed the basis for collaboration between myself and Artist and writer Fritz Horstman.
Fritz Horstman is a multi-discipline artist whose practice explores nature and culture. He is Education Director at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
My aim has been to respond to self taught Eighteenth and Nineteenth century women artists and naturalists who were predominant in producing herbariums, watercolours’ and embroideries of nature, as this was frequently considered a feminine leisure activity. The intention was to to embrace their creativity and celebrate their beauty.
The objective was to dematerialise the prints and produce a set of prints that relate to skeletal plant structures as a suggestion to botanical specimens to reinforce and acknowledge forgotten artists, whose images are lasting examples of plants and insects now extinct
I have used typographic punctuation marks transferring them into different pattern formations to form a narrative. The time it takes to produce these sequences unites the pursuit of hand-stitched needlepoint while utilising a repeated mark within a non- repeated pattern.
My idea evolved from a direct response and visual reaction to a specific place, while responding to the relationship between human activity and nature’s resilience.