joanne koltnow

  • botanicals

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about botanicals

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I’ve been making art since I was a child, working in various media but always coming back to photography.

 

For about 20 years I photographed people and made dark, often mysterious, images. In 2003, wanting to digitize some negatives my father had made in the 1930s, I bought a flatbed scanner. And then one day I put a flower on the glass. The resulting image—magnified and transparent—took my breath away. It also changed the direction of my photography.

 

The flowers I now make—with their floating, watercolor-like effect—remind me of early French botanical drawings. When I add containers to the objects on the scanner, the image is unpredictably transformed.

 

In 2007, I started combining the scanned images with monotype and chine collé (a form of collage). Printmaking was one of my earlier loves. And like photography, it offers the opportunity to make multiples. I’ve been playing with my pictures of dills, an old etching press, and a variety of inks and papers. I’m just getting started; there’s much more to explore.

 

I’m also examining what happens when I push something all the way into the bottle—when the container completely encloses the flower. I’m looking at how the material conforms to the inside of the bottle, how the glass distorts the object inside, and how focus and distance play out in the image. I’m also noticing the effects of scale and of proximity to other bottles. And I’m discovering that some bottles, and some rows, have a disturbing effect on viewers. This project may, in fact, be a way for me to get back to making mysterious images.


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