The Future of Pollination - Manufactured Ecosystems

 

Our Fate Is Tied To That Of The Insects, linocut print, 16" x20", Ele Willoughby, 2025

Pollinator Week is a great time to share this print, which expresses the central theme of my work about the Future of Pollination for Manufactured Ecosystems. I have been working on a collection of 15 prints for this show for the last several months. Our food sources and ecosystems around us are dependent on pollinators (mostly bees & other insects, some birds & mammals) but insects populations have lost huge numbers and many species altogether. Our future will be linked to their fate. Each of the bees, moths, butterflies and beetles in my print are native species here. 

Next week our art show will open at Zavitz Art Gallery at the University of Guelph. Each of the visual artists has produced work on various themes in various media about our ecological future looking forward the wake of climate change and habitat loss and at what we can learn from nature. I’m really excited to see what the others have produced! I hope you’ll come see the show if you’re able. 

Photosynthesis
Artist: Yulia Shtern @magical_zoo

Soil Formation
Artist: Lynx @amour.lynx

Cultural Services
Artist: Pablo Rios @the_amazing_world_of_redacted

Biodiversity
Artist: Melanie Barnett
@melanie.barnett.ceramics

Climate Regulation
Artist: Amanda White @thetiniestseed

Early Photographic Methods: Anthotypes and Cyanotypes

Anthotype of raspberry leaves made on paper coated with juice from day lily petals

Anthotype of plants made on paper coated with older day lily blooms

Making art using plants lead me to experimenting with anthotypes, an early photographic method of coating paper with juice from photosensitive plants and then exposing them, for hours or even days, to sunlight. I've had varied results. It can be a little unpredictable. Some argue that this medium is always ephemeral, and always subject to fading, but some anthotypes exist which were made a century ago. So if carefully stored or displayed (away from direct sunlight and/or under UV-resistant glass), they can be long-lasting. 

Reading up about the method I learned that it was invented by none other than great mathematician, writer and polymath, Mary Somerville (1780-1872). 

My linocut portrait of Mary Somerville

She wrote about her findings in a letter to Sir John Herschel (nephew of Caroline, also in my women in STEM series). Herschel presented her results to the Royal Society* & did a lot of further research on early photographic methods, so he is often credited with this invention too. 

Sir John Herschel's own accomplishments include the discovery of the cyanotype method to make images first used in 1842, which produces a cyan blue print used today for monochromatic art or blueprints. It is made using a slow-reacting, photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300nm to 400nm known as UVA radiation. Two chemicals are mixed: potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, and coated on a surface.

The first person to publish a book with photographs was botanist and scientific illustrator Anna Atkins. A friend of both William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, and Sir John Herschel, she was well positioned to understand what these methods could mean to scientific illustration, and as such she was acting as a science employing the high tech imaging of her day. When I made her portrait, I carved her as a linocut and then combined that with a blue screen print of fern leaves to mimic the look of the cyanotypes that she used in her books on seaweed and ferns. I have long wanted to make her portrait with actual cyanotypes so, that was my first goal when I started experimenting with making cyanotypes on paper and fabric.

Anna Atkins, linocut and cyanotype by Ele Willoughby, 2022

I have also been making a number of cyanotypes of plants and sometimes incorporating my linocut images on acetate. These are mediums which have a lot of potential and I'm experimenting!

Cyanotype of Queen Anne's Lace by Ele Willoughby

Cyanotype with linocuts of moths, flowers, grasses, and narcomedusa by Ele Willoughby

Cyanotype of my Narcomedusa linocut

*On the Action of the Rays of the Spectrum on Vegetable Juices. Extract of a Letter from Mrs. M Somerville to Sir J.F.W. Herschel, Bart., dated Rome, September 20, 1845. Communicated by Sir J. Herschel. Received November 6, -Read November 27, 1845, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 136 (1846), p. 111-120.

Freedom of the Press, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Creative Blocks and Animal Prints

 I have been working away, when I could, while we've been trying to do remote school for the first couple months of the year. I actually managed to keep up with the Printer Solstice prompt and made a new print a week. Now that schools have reopened here, I have a chance to share some of my latest prints. 

Freedom of the Press, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021

I wasn't quite sure where to go with the theme "freedom of the press". I went with a winged Gutenberg press, thinking of the initial freedom it represented after its invention. (By the way, it's often presented as the first press, moveable type and paper were invented in China). I made a several different prints with this block, rather than a single edition.

The next theme was Blood, Sweat and Tears:

Blood, Sweat and Tears, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021

This "Blood, Sweat and Tears" lino block print is about how we as people reflect our origines in the ocean. Printed from 8 hand-carved blocks it shows blood cells racing through an artery, a cross-section of our skin with a sweat gland, an eye with a tear and a section of ocean seawater.

There's a well-known quotation from Isak Dinesen (the pen-name of Karen Blixen);

“‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘I know of a cure for everything: salt water.’

‘Salt water?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.’"

This oft-given advice that hardwork, releasing your emotions or visiting the sea is the answer to any problem plays on the fact that sweat and tears are just salty water. But, in fact, we ourselves are predominently water, and we preserve the salinity of the environment of our earliest ancestors, from even before the first lobe-finned fish decided to seek refuge on land, in the Devonian (about 360 million years ago).

Next up was Creative Blocks. I opted for carving a collection of kid's wooden building blocks and then printing them on assorted beautiful patterned papers (both Japanese washi and European papers), so that some of them were "creative". I have made a whole series of these prints, each unique.

Creative Blocks, series of linocuts by Ele Willoughby, 20201

The next prompt was Animal Prints. So much of what I do is animal prints I wasn't sure what to do. It occurred to me that choosing insects might be a less common choice. Then I discovered that a group of moths is called an eclipse and I knew I had to add to my terms of venery series for groups of animals.

An Eclipse of Moths, linocut by Ele Willoughby 2021

This hand-printed lino block print shows five of the noctural moths of Ontario in front of the moon at a lunar eclipse. The five moths are: the gorgeous green Luna moth (Actias luna), the yellow and purplish-pink Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), the Five-spotted Hawk Moth in brown with orange spots (Manduca quinquemaculata), the red-orange, black and cream Virgin Tiger Moth (Apantesis virgo), and the black and white White Underwing (Catocala relicta).

I designed the typefaces to suggest the meaning of the words. "Eclipse" is full of crescent moon shapes. "Moths" is written in moth shapes.

More Moths

I found this awesome and somewhat psychedelic moth fabric so I had to make some more "It's not the moths" pillows. There are now four options for the backing fabric.

Pillows too

I've also been making block printed pillows, and pillows with printed fabric showing my 'It's not the moths' linocut.