The Ultimate in Pressed Flowers by Rachel Dein

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Rachel Dein是一位喜欢铸模的艺术家，惯于制作植物和花朵形象的石膏砖或板。Sorrel Everton在Gardes Illustrated杂志中这样描述他的作品：“这些不可思议的简单的作品被注入了美好的氛围和好奇心。这些植物正在讲述一个故事，关于凋零之前最美丽的瞬间。它们的纹理、形状和精致都在石膏板中精细地呈现出来。”

过去25年，Dein既是艺术家也是道具设计师。19岁进入美术院校学习艺术，从那时起英国摄影师、雕塑家和环保主义者Andy Goldsworthy的一句话对她产生了深远的影响：“每一件事物都经历生长、停滞、衰败的全过程，照片能展示出它的最具生命力的时刻，它的极致。”1年后，亲人的死去对她打击很大，彼时《百年孤独》中的一段话引发了她在奇奇怪怪的地方种植植物的想法，那时她开始雕刻蔬菜，并用相机记录下过程。

在短暂修习了玻璃制造的课程后，Dein回到学校的工作室，开始试验将东西压进陶土里铸模，然后将石膏灌进去。她被这样方式所呈现出来的作品的细节迷住了。于是离开学校开设了自己的工作室。但事业难以为继。之后，Dein通过为英国国家剧院等多家剧院做道具师来维持生活。

5年后，Dein得到一个机会可以使用工作室6个月。在这期间，她又开始用土豆雕刻人物和动物。回想这段经历，她觉得从那时起就预示出她将来要从事跟植物和雕刻相关的工作。

2001年，Dein成为一名母亲。等她的第三个孩子开始上学之后，她终于有时间开始创作一些小的石膏板，这是‘Tactile Studio’的雏形。在一次当地教堂举办的展览上，一家画廊看中了她的作品，邀请她去展出。之后她得到了第一份委托，有人买了她制作的一小片石膏板之后，邀请她为他的家人制作一张肖像。

Dein有一个想法，她希望能留存自己婚礼上的鲜花，这是她开始创作“Botanical（植物的）”主题作品的原因。

Dein的作品已经连续两年在RHS Chelsea花展上展出，并且获奖。她的作品也将会被收录在美国摄影师Ngoc Minh出版的以植物为创作对象的艺术家作品合集中。

I’m an artist who loves casting. I make tile or panels using the impressions of plants and flowers. This is how Sorrel Everton described my work last year in Gardens Illustrated magazine – “these incredibly simple objects are imbued with curiosity and atmosphere. The plants tell a story of a fleeting moment of glory before they faded, their texture, pattern and delicacy, rendered rich in the plaster casting”.

My work today is the culmination of my life as an artist and a prop maker over the past 25 years. So a good place to start in order to understand the roots of my work is Art College. I was 19 when I started my degree in Fine Art. Our college was one where you were left to you own devices. In the first few months I pretty much floundered without any structure and not much to say. The things that I’d enjoyed about art like drawing and sculpting from life were frowned upon, so I joined everyone else in being experimental. I played around with photography and plants, which was always an interest of mine. I liked the work of Andy Goldsworthy – a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who produced site-specific sculpture situated in natural and urban settings. Photography played a crucial role in his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. According to Goldsworthy, “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive.”
Disaster struck at the end of my first year, I was told that someone very close to me was going to die. After a miserable period of time I finally found my voice. I drew on a memory from childhood of throwing a handful of melon seeds down the bathroom sink, only to discover some weeks later plants growing up and out of the overflow. It seemed to encapsulate everything I wanted to express. It showed me how tough and tenacious nature is, which I found comforting. At the time I was reading Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in which there were many descriptions of ruins overrun with plants- “Overnight the house was plunged into a crisis on senility. A soft moss grew up the walls.” I started to grow plants in unusual places like amongst the bristles of a toothbrush and through the upholstery of furniture. From here I started to carve furniture out of vegetables. For me the furniture represented people. These I filmed using stop-motion. As they dried up the camera caught them ‘coming alive’.

I signed up for a short class in glass blowing where we were told to press shapes into wet sand into which we then poured molten glass – a basic but effective way of casting in glass. I went back to my college studio and started experimenting with pressing things into clay and then pouring plaster into the clay. I was amazed and fascinated at the detail achieved. When I left college, I briefly had a studio which appropriately was a disused fruit and vegetable shop in Spitalfields Market. But this couldn’t last – I needed to get a job.
I started an apprenticeship as a prop maker at the English National Opera. This was the beginning of my prop making career, which I loved (getting paid to paint and sculpt!). I worked freelance for 15 years for different theatres and museums like Madame Tussauds, the Royal Opera House, Shakespeare’s Globe, and various West End Theatres.

After five years of being a freelance prop maker, the opportunity came up to have a studio space for 6 months. I continued to explore the materials and subject matter that had interested me before. I was drawn to the stories of Frankenstein, and the Golem – of man attempting to create ‘life’. I began carving human features from potato, like a mouth, a brow of a face and hands. I filmed them using time lapse/stop motion. I was interested in what they would ‘say’ as they moved. From hands carved out of potato I moved on to animal ‘hands’. I manipulated chicken feet into different human gestures like begging, praying and swearing and then cast them into plaster.  Using 102 chicken feet manipulated into different positions of British Sign Language, I spelt out “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God”. I was trying to show what we are other than just flesh – and what animal matter is compared to vegetable matter, and then what human is compared to animal. Looking back now I can see how these two interests of using natural materials and casting have fed into my current work. As well as the continuing interest in capturing the ephemeral.

In 2001 I became a mother and still worked part time. But my life as a prop maker and artist finally stopped when my third child came along. At last when she started school I began making again. Starting in my loft by making small plaster tiles- this was the beginning of ‘Tactile Studio’. A local church put a call out for creative people in the area to show their work, where a gallery saw my tiles and invited me to exhibit. My first commission was from somebody who’d bought one of my small tiles and wanted me to make a family portrait for her. This is made up from the favourite things belonging to herself, her husband and their children.

I’d always wanted to preserve the flowers from my wedding and realised that at least I could use the same type of flowers if not the original ones from my bouquet This was the start of the ‘Botanical ‘ work I’m now making.

I’ve shown my work at RHS Chelsea Flower Show for a couple of years now and hope to be accepted again for 2016. It was very exciting to be selected as a finalist for RHS’s Garden Product of the Year. My concrete pieces were incorporated in the award winning Wellbeing for Women garden at the RHS Hampton Court Show in June.  And finally I’m looking forward to being included in a book by American photographer Ngoc Minh about to be published covering artists who work with plants.

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