Catherine Art: Botanics Practitioners

For the Botanics unit, we had to look at the work of some artists and designers that use botanical subjects as inspiration. I looked at some work by "Timorous Beasties", Colette Hazelwood, Michael Michaud and Georgia O'Keeffe.

I was particularly interested in some of the wallpaper designs by Timorous Beasties because of the colours and patterns they used.

Here is a selection:

Bloomsbury Garden
Wallpaper

Opera Botanica
Wallpaper

Butterflies Wallpaper
Antique

Butterflies Wallpaper
Frost

Butterflies Wallpaper
Duck Egg Blue

Colette Hazelwood is a jewellery designer who uses real flower petals to make her jewellery.

Flower Range

I was inspired by her work and wanted to try it for myself, so I pressed some flowers and found some of the grasses that I had pressed before. I then laminated them, cut them out leaving a small border around the plants and used a leather punch to make a small hole so that I could add the plants to jewellery using jump rings.

Another botanically inspired jeweller is Michael Michaud. I'm very impressed with his work and hope to learn more about his techniques in making botanical jewellery.

His items are so detailed that they look very realistic and delicate. I am intrigued that he uses bronze and would be interested in finding out more about this material in jewellery making.