Stitch Life – Watercolors and Plants by Laurence Courdier #Art and Botany

I invite you to a botanical visual meditation: Stitch Life (Stitch: sewing), a series of watercolors, a kind of still life (still life) where plants are sewn into the painting. The watercolor and the plant are subject to needlework.

In Stitch Life the guide plant the needle. That-the captures a moment of the ephemeral gesture of the plant and inscribes it in the rhythm of the brush. The arabesques of the plant are trapped in the thread and are like an echo of the watercolor line.

This exploration of couture and botany is a meeting of two worlds not so foreign to each other. The threads come from the transformation of plants.

Our slow gestures, concentrated on our sewing work, weave a new plant organization. This work also invites us to reflect on gestures and their rhythm. Each of the meticulous gestures of the creative process testifies to a duration that is measured by the transformed material.

In the constitution of a herbarium this time has stopped. In a lady’s work, it is an intimate time outside of objective time that punctuates our lives. Finally in the sobriety of the brush stroke or the vaporization of watercolor by the breath it is a meditative form of painting which accompanies the vegetable form

These gestures will never be as slow as the movement of plant species. As Francis Hallé, botanist said, “our life will have been only a brief flicker while plants grow and move through space over millions of years”. And long after we have laid our work, the plants, they will continue their gestures.

This series Stitch Life began in 2005 with the collection in different places of plant tissues with the objective of perpetuating their unique shape by crimping them, like a jewel, using colored threads. Collecting plants of distant origin or from here and linking them to another space through the meticulous gesture of sewing, freeing them from their precarious destiny and giving us the illusion of eternity and their immanence.

A new series of Stitch Life produced in 2011 continues to explore the evocative power of plants linked to threads and the line of the brush, this time staging multiplicity, accumulation: petals, fruits, seeds, leaves. Scattered on the painted watercolor paper, the disorderly plant forms are reorganized in the weft of the threads.

The use of thread lends itself to the painterly technique of mixing colors. Watercolor is used for its diaphanous and fluid quality and becomes the support for the expression of the plant and the threads. From watercolor to wire, a frame is drawn and captures a moment in the life of the plant.

24 Stitch Life watercolors each approx. 42 x 32 cm framed. The materials used are 300 g watercolor paper, watercolor paint, embroidery thread and cotton and polyester thread and plants.