Lauren Farkas

Reflections on Being a Spider and Making Botanical Inkings

2D Studio Art - Painting and Drawing

The botanical inkings flow from a place of stagnation like a cascade from a slowly filling lake. Since the pandemic first anchored us down to the soil where we live, I’ve struggled with the stagnant feeling of being caught in a spider’s web. Sometimes I feel like I am thrashing in ill fated thought-ruts, and at times I have felt literally stuck in place during the stay-at-home orders. I have realized slowly, however, that while I may be restricted in some aspects, the web is mine and I am the spider weaving, not the doomed fly floundering. I have “silk” I can draw from my own body (like creativity, or ink to paper) to make a way through thin air, and while I may be stationary, I am not caught—I am doing the catching. My passivity can animate to autonomy, and panic can loosen into confidence; this is my radial labyrinth, and I have the resources I need to grace the silken walkways and weave new connections. I can make a kind of home that catches life, rather than always seeking to find life somewhere else. The woven kudzu vine behind the botanical inkings nods to this process of finding autonomy somewhere between the warp and weft of time and space.

The materiality of this body of work is rooted HERE, in the First, Second, and Third Creek watersheds. I harvested kudzu for the weaving and paper from the Third Creek Greenway and The Museum of Infinite Outcomes in Parkridge, and I gathered the black walnuts I used to make the ink in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood.

My first inking on the kudzu paper was late winter’s hairy bittercress, whose rosette basal leaves send up a spire with small dark cattails and bunched blooms. Ki just caught me (no, I caught the ki!) right outside my back door. Ki was in the center of my web. Then I identified henbit, dead nettle, and persian speedwell—the lawn greens which are not grass, but are better food for bees and ants and offer up myriad colors as the season progresses. I expanded my radius to collect more botanical noticings. I walked my neighborhood and cycled to the Urban Wilderness in the Tennessee River watershed to watch spring shake more seeds into growth.

The inkings feel lovely—to research, prepare, and to make. They require me to spend time walking through the young green things, documenting and noticing with every sense. The looking and the knowing is intimate and deep. It feels reminiscent of the relational knowing developed through painting a portrait of a stranger as a way to come to know them. Veins in a leaf are like lines of a forehead: crevices that tell stories of deep time in shallow light.

I jot down notes and spend time meditating on each plant to compose an expanded title for each that captures what the inking cannot, such as color, aroma, size, and context. Through this practice, a pattern of grammar developed with the following rules:

- No capitalizations excepting the official names

- A noun or adjective may be a complete sentence if it is specific enough - New regions of the plant are separated by a period

- Adjacent observations of the same region are linked by commas

- A further elaboration of the same part can be added after a dash