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After Nature
Sue McLaren
After Nature is a book of photographs overlaid with letter-pressed text. It is about 30 x 22 cms, and is in an edition of 12 copies. It is hard back with Japanese stab binding.
This book /installation piece is part of a series that deals with repeated pregnancy loss. As part of this series I created a series of unique prints (mono-printing technique) and then used the results for different projects for which eggs collected is one. For this book, I placed a digital copy of one of the prints as the first layer when I made the papermache eggs. The ink of the digital copy almost completely vanished, and was then painted over with black and white acrylics to bring out the image.
In many of my maternity themed works I use the image of birds as the longing for freedom. The egg has a tradition of standing for fertility.
For those who are struggling to conceive and carry a child an early pregnancy scan is both a very hopeful moment. You know you are pregnant. But at the same time, when you already had multiply miscarriages, it’s also the start of a worry. And often, an early scan is only made if and where there is a reason to worry.
The eggs in which these scans (or rather abstract images made to resemble an early pregnancy scan) are placed are not intact. They are open.
I found the experience of having a pregnancy scan, while hopeful and interesting, also weirdly intrusive, like I am looking at something that shouldn’t be seen.
The concept of ‘Fragments’ evolved out of my fascination for a tiny fragment of bracelet which was one of many extraordinary things excavated from the Bronze Age burial cist (circa 1730 to 1600 cal BC), on White Horse Hill, Dartmoor in 2011. The artefact is braided with 13 double strands of cow hair. This has provided a rich metaphor for the construction of the book which includes 13 etchings, 13 double strands of text with 13 syllables in each line, and a fragment of 13 double strand wire braiding.
The burial cist, in which the artefacts were found, was constructed with six granite slabs: a base, four upended sides and a cap stone set above. Hence the blue card folder has a base, four sides and cover.
For detailed information on the ‘Whitehorse Hill’ excavation, the publication ‘Preserved in the Peat’ (Jones 2022) provides the narrative of the cist’s discovery. The prehistoric armlet is archived in the Box Museum, Plymouth.
