Finder

Three-color, screenprinted artist's book
16 pages, 9" x 12" edition of 180
hand bound and published by Kayrock Screenprinting, Brooklyn, NY

In Finder, images of fern specimens from the George Vasey Herbarium layer and mingle with sixteenth century botanical engravings appropriated from John Gerard’s Herbal and with selections from Fern Finder, a contemporary pocket field guide to North American ferns. Finder locates its subject within a compost-like mixture of visual languages and aesthetic practices. The idealized and colonizing language of early modern engraving, the utilitarian generalization of diagrams, and the decaying plant forms and collection data of herbarium pages unmake and remake each other as abstraction, effecting a forest like space that invites consideration of how human order is imposed on nature.

Essay on Finder by Keith Pluymers and Melissa Oresky, published in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture