I’ve made this textile artwork in Australia in January 2020. During my vacation stay at a remote rural rainforest area in Queensland, I’ve created a series of cyanotypes on textile inspired by the incredible biodiversity of local plants. My idea was to create a stylized printed vest which comes into life with an ornament of plants laid out in the form of faces of forest spirits. In the flow of the interaction between the leaves of wild plants, chemicals for cyanotype and the sun, the process of creation took place, and I’ve acted only as a guide, a detached observer submitting and honoring the higher forces of nature, the beauty of each and every leaf and a twig. I did not want to subdue or tame nature, on the contrary, I wanted to capture the many faces of nature, so very different and alive, specifically on textile. In the process of creating these prints it happened that I almost forgot about time, about modern technologies, so the printing process was all about nature, and it brought me closer to the primitive self, a shaman, a creator, devoid of all ambitions, except one – to become closer to God and myself.
Below you can see some pictures of the cyanotype prints in the making: plants that I collected in the rainforest; a photo of the cyanotype solarization during the printing process; drying the print after washing it with water (at this point the print dries, darkens and is finally fixing on the fabric).
