Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco Plants in Bloom: A reading list mapping the geographies of kinship in researching, making and understanding Plants as Ink, their unique patterns and blooms. . . Reference Readings in a timeline Fieldwork BSBI Code of Conduct 2017 (bsbi.org) The Code sets out best practice in the field and provides the latest guidance about which plants you can and cannot pick even with landowner permission (including all plants on prohibited lists such as Schedule 8) and introduces the rile of 1 in 20 Logan, Jason, Making Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (Abr ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco The   more I research into the positive feelings of wellbeing when we are bathed in  green spaces, the more I read about oxytocin, our human magic hormone… and it all happens via our visual and non-visual pathway in the brain! Oxytocin has many functions – it helps in childbirth, breast feeding and bonding but also helps to enhanced sociability, trust and feelings of calmness. Oxytocin  reduces our blood pressure and cortisol levels resulting in beautiful calm states of wellbeing. How does this happen? (https://www.istockphoto.com/i ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco One of my aims of this project was to explore potential fine art applications of using the botanical inks. It seems that many artists and artisans use their botanical inks for dyeing fabrics and not many artists take botanical inks into a fine art application.   My interests in science and art coming together through  traditional botanical illustration, lead me to develop my ideas as I went through an experimentation fine art period. At this point I tried different ways to use my natural palette in a contemporary fine art botanical  ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco During this art-science project of making a natural botanical palette of my own using wild plants, I learned how to be a responsible forager as recommended by The Woodland Trust and BSBI Code of Conduct as proposed by the National History Museum. I became a more eco-friendly artist taking note of these recommendations. As I collected plant specimens,  I followed the 1 in 20 rule  whereby I would only target plants that were growing abundantly taking one or two from an area then moving on to the next similar plant.  Never uprooting  p ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco The drawing above show just how complex the wiring is in our retina leading off to the optic nerve.    As I’ve been familiarising myself  into how we see and why green spaces instil in us beautiful feelings of  wellbeing, it seems we have two ways of seeing – the regular visual pathway that most of us will be familiar with but there is also another separate way of seeing called the non-visual pathway. This non-visual pathway causes physiological affects on brains and central nervous systems .   The drawing below shows cones on r ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco   The ancient green pigment, chlorophyll  is nature’s symbol of life. It has been in existence, here on earth  for three billion years and is responsible for the  beautiful living green palette we see all around us. Its hard to  achieve a real ‘plant-green’ when making botanical inks. I have made  a range of hues from yellowy greens, to earthy greens. The closest I’ve come to a real plant green is from nettle leaves that are dark and mature. Light micrograph showing a section through a leaf.  (https://www.reddit.com/r ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco Inventory of inks  (Feb – Dec) To date, I have foraged, harvested and made 34 botanical inks throughout the season. This number has quite surprised me! Each ink brings back a memory of a walk, a place, an experience and a story. For example, one day, a walk in Wales presented us a multitude of gorse bushes, each adorned with beautiful yellow flowers embedded in prickly thorns. Picking these colourful gorse flowers was a challenge and added an hour to our already long walk. I had to improvise and put the valuable stash of collected flowers in the ho ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco Plants are reliant on sunlight for their existence. The sun determines their life cycle. Sunlight informs a plant to germinate, when to grow and ultimately,  when to die off ready for its dormant period in the winter.  When the spring arrives, warmer sunlight stimulates the plant to begin all over again. So perhaps its hardly surprising  when botanical inks  are made from plants, the sunlight still seems to have control of it’s new life as an ink.  These ephemeral botanical inks appear intense in colour initially and then lose i ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco Being in green spaces helps us to feel calmer and less anxious which is good for our mental health and sense of wellbeing. According to an NHS report,  people who spend at least two hours per week in nature  are shown to have better general health and higher psychological wellbeing than those who don’t visit nature at all.  Being amongst nature is truly therapeutic – but why? Although there is much more research needed, specialists are finding how different  wavelengths of colour light  affect our central nervous system  ..read more

Informed Fine Art - By Susan Lily Brisco How we React to colour and its Impact on our Central Nervous System. Rods and cones are photoreceptors found in abundance in the retina. The Rods are sensitive to the  intensity of light whereas the cones are wonderful in that they give us our colour vision. Life  would be pretty dull if we only saw in black and white. Our vision is a true gift! There are around 6,000,000 cones in the centre of the retina and these are sensitive to three  wavelengths of light. 10% are sensitive to blue light wavelength, (450-495 nm) 30% sensitive to gree ..read more