The Secret Lives of Plants and Insects

04 June - 27 June 2015

In this exhibition John Wolseley explores complex life forces and leads the viewer into the umwelt or life world of plants and insects. The Secret Lives of Plants and Insects includes watercolours, etchings, wood blocks and nature prints that have been created over 20 years and thousands of kilometres.

 

The exhibition features two series of monoprints on mulberry and gampi paper in which Wolseley has taken prints of desert plants and the tracks of beetle larvae as they bore through the wood under the bark of trees. Wolseley uses an ancient Italian technique to print the complex tracks and journeys directly from the subjects, so revealing a whole life story. The works are influenced by Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexkull’s theory that all life forms experience their umwelten or environments differently.

 

In the first series of monoprints we are led into the umwelt of the larvae of Longicorn beetles. The second series shows plants found in the desert dunes near Coward Springs in the southern reaches of the Simpson Desert. One of these, a Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) has seeds, which were an important food source for the Arrernte people. At first the plants are a bright green and then turn red, throw out clouds of tiny black seeds and finally wither into blackness.

 

The beetle and plant prints in this exhibition join with other images to take us on a journey through central and northern Australia and across to the Indonesian archipelago, as they celebrate the beauty and diversity of the secret world of plants and insects.

 

Plants and animals experience their own subjective worlds with different perceptual frameworks than ours. A swallow living on the wing and on the wind has its own particular ‘life world’. As has the beetle, which I found just hatched on a desert poplar among sand hills. By printing directly from the life histories which the beetle larvae have engraved under the bark, (with their own autobiographies as it were), I have tried to get nearer to the being of these mysterious creatures. Or I hope at least to limit the extent to which I impose my own structures on the insect in an anthropomorphic way. I once put my ear to the trunk of a tree and heard the sound of a witchetty grub gnawing its passage under the bark. So with these prints I am still learning from beetles. Or as Matsuo Basho put it  – ‘Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.’

John Wolseley 2015

 

The artist acknowledges the brilliant and skilled assistance of Kaitlyn Gibson and Cassandra Gill in the printing of the beetle biographies.

 

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