Abstract
Botanical illustration combines scientific knowledge and artistic technique. However, whereas illustrated botanical images record static visual qualities, such as form and color, written botanical narratives supply crucial sensory, ecological, historical, and cultural contexts that complement visual representation. Understanding the text-image interface—where images and words intersect—contributes to humanities-based analyses of botanical illustration and illustrators. More specifically, a process philosophy perspective reveals the extent to which botanical representations engage the temporality, cyclicality, and contextuality of the living plants being illustrated. This article takes up these themes through a comparative theoretical study of three female Western Australian botanical illustrators, Georgiana Leake (1812-1869), Emily Pelloe (1877-1941), and Philippa Nikulinsky (born 1942), whose lives together span the 183 year history of the Swan River Colony and the state of Western Australia. I apply a processist framework to examine the text-image interface of their works. All three illustrators use some form of textuality: marginalia, annotations, written accompaniments, introductory statements, and other narrative materials. In examining their written commentaries and traces, I identify the emergence of a process mode of botanical illustration that represents plants as ecological, historical, cultural, and temporal organisms.
Highlights
Process Philosophy as a Critical Perspective on Botanical IllustrationThis article is a comparative theoretical study of three female Western Australian botanical illustrators, Georgiana Leake (1812–1869), Emily Pelloe (1877–1941), and Philippa Nikulinsky, whose lives and works together span the 183 year history of the Swan River Colony and the state of Western Australia
And to some extent individually, the works of Leake, Pelloe, and Nikulinsky demonstrate an evolution towards greater attentiveness to the ecological processes and symbiotic associations of Western Australian plants over time
Nikulinsky’s poetic writings, in close conjunction with her illustrations, mark the evolution of botanical illustration, as a Western Australian tradition, from an imperialist tool aligned with scientific classification to an embodied mode of appreciating the subtle changes plants undergo over time
Summary
This article is a comparative theoretical study of three female Western Australian botanical illustrators, Georgiana Leake (1812–1869), Emily Pelloe (1877–1941), and Philippa Nikulinsky (born 1942), whose lives and works together span the 183 year history of the Swan River Colony and the state of Western Australia. And to some extent individually, the works of Leake, Pelloe, and Nikulinsky demonstrate an evolution towards greater attentiveness to the ecological processes and symbiotic associations of Western Australian plants over time. Nikulinsky’s poetic writings, in close conjunction with her illustrations, mark the evolution of botanical illustration, as a Western Australian tradition, from an imperialist tool aligned with scientific classification to an embodied mode of appreciating the subtle changes plants undergo over time. It is the written marginalia and text in tandem with the visual illustration itself that helps to situate the rendered botanical species “in a wider cultural field” ([9]). It is my goal here to introduce a novel theoretical perspective through process for articulating the nuances of their botanical illustrations and charting an overall progression between their works—from colonial to contemporary times, from the representation of the flower in relative isolation to the representation of the perpetually shifting ecological lifeworld of the plant
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