Kris Iden's Page

About the newly posted prints - They are from a body of work titled:
Movement in Plants and were exhibited at Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia March 2008.

Herbaria are collections of preserved plant specimens used to study geographic distributions and taxonomy. Fossils are naturally preserved remains of plants or animals.

The three individual floral images in both groups of prints are from plants – Gelsemium, Acer Palmatum and Hamamelis - put in by the previous owner of our garden & house in Richmond. They are flattened out and presented in a manner that references botanical practices. They serve as a metaphor for place and for something that I tended and engaged with but did not fix or hold permanently.

The plates in the Herbaria:locus series are sized to fit and fill the paper and reference the traditional herbarium sheet used by botanists. The other (color) images are new plates with images or fragments derived from my past work. The color is in most cases not a direct quote but was rather influenced by color relationship found in Persian miniature painting. It was at the time a intuitive choice, but later became clear that it fit with a theme of recasting and ‘reknowing’ old characters in new roles and new unfamiliar surrounds.

The black floral plates (3 plates for each image) were made by me and then handed over to a printer at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden to make 12 variable prints with each set of floral image. All 12 are different because the printer shifted – using a gridded template - the plates each time a print was made. Here you see 4 prints from each group of 12 monoprints. There are 36 prints in total for the Herbaria: locus series and they were handed back to me to resolve the initial work (compositional issues set up by the printer) with the color plates and inked embossing.

The role of the printer and his involvement served as a metaphor for a new foreign place and new circumstances. Handing over the floral plates was analogous to relinquishing control over my circumstances as a result of my move to Germany in the summer of 2006, along with giving some aspect of myself to this new place. Working into the imposed set of compositional circumstances with a record of images from previous work is analogous to the process of adaptation, of finding a sense of self in circumstances not familiar and not fully of one’s own making. It is a borrowed idea from John Cage of enlisting chance but with an allowance for some choice and degree of aesthetic decision making.

In the Fossili: motus group there are six pieces with printed shapes and six with embossed shapes. These shapes are derived from a map of the planting beds at the Dresden Botanic Garden. The large floral images are all printed from the same copper plate that has been selectively inked and wiped and the paper turned to vary the placement of each. The small rectangular square plates bear a loose reference to the ‘roping off area’ practice of archeological digging.

The Power of Movement in Plants

Darwin wrote this book in 1880 to study plants’ adaptation to surrounds and their response to ever-changing environments.

I was interested in expressing something about movement and to have the work in some way “move” – and so utilized the language and materials inherent in printmaking. The plates themselves were moved around in the printing process, making this body of work more a record of movement rather than actual –
and encourages the eyes of the viewer to move as one takes in shifting images and moments of color.