Capturing Nature takes nature printing around the world to reach new audiences by connecting creative practitioners (artists and designers) with scholars, botanists, climatologists, experts in related fields, collectors, institutions, green-minded companies as well as amateurs to explore the many aspects of nature printing through book projects, exhibitions, and public events.
The discovery of a smallish green book in a flea market in Vienna in 2020 ago sparked the imagination of two like-minded visual pilots: Matthew Zucker, Irving Zucker Art Books in America, and London-based Swedish printmaker, Pia Östlund, who came together through their shared passion for Nature Printing to spearhead this initiative, Capturing Nature.
Matthew Zucker
Founded in New York by Irving Zucker in 1942, Zucker Art Books was revived by Matthew Zucker, the founder’s grandson with the publication in 2006 of Dieter Roth in Print: Artists’ Books. With one foot anchored in antiquarian books, Matthew stepped with the other into contemporary books, publishing commissioned projects and multiples by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Adam Pendleton. Matthew Zucker has spent decades curating the most extensive collection of nature prints ever assembled, with more than 13,000 images across 130 rare and seminal works, including journals, published books, unique manuscripts, American currency, and instructional texts related to nature printing from 1733 to 1902. Matthew resides in the Berkshires, Massachusetts.
www.zuckerartbooks.com
Pia Östlund
Pia Östlund is a Swedish printmaker, artist and researcher based in London. Her practice is informed by nature, archive collections, a sense of place, and narratives. Pia has revived a lost nineteenth century nature printing process which creates curiously life-like images of plants on paper. Its history and rediscovery were described in The Nature-Printer – A tale of industrial espionage, ferns & roofing-lead, with writer Simon Prett (The TimPress 2016). Since 2001, she has been a consultant to Chelsea Physic Garden, London, and Oxford Botanic Garden. She has given talks and workshops on nature printing at the The Linnean Society of London, Royal Horticultural Society, Cambridge University Botanic Gardens and BBC Radio 4, and more.
www.ostlundindustries.com
The Network
Oleg Barburin is a Massachusetts-based photographer.
Régine Fabri has a PhD in Botany from the ULiège. She worked as a botanist and as Head of Library and Archives at Meise Botanical Garden (Belgium).
Dr. Harry Willis Fleming is a historian, creative practitioner, and consultant concerned with the ways that architecture and place engage with memory and imagination. His recent scholarly research focus has been the nineteenth-century artist and tower-dweller Richard Cockle Lucas (1800–1883), for which he was awarded a Henry Moore Research Fellowship (2012), and a funded doctoral Research Studentship at Middlesex University (2012–2016).
Haller Brun is an Amsterdam-based graphic design studio run by Sonja Haller and Pascal Brun. They mainly work in the fields of art, design, and architecture, with a focus on editorial design.
Nicole Hanquart is Head of Library, Art, and Archives at the Meise Botanical Garden (Belgium). She has a degree in art history from the KULeuven and an MA in history from the UCLouvain.
Naomi Hume is an associate professor of art history in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Seattle University. She specializes in the history of modern art and visual culture.
Jessica C. Linker is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, and the codirector of Huskiana Press.
Adam Lowe is the director of Factum Arte and founder of Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation. He was trained in fine art at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and the RCA London.
Harriet Rix read biochemistry at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and was also president of the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles. She worked for the UK charity the Tree Council and now studies plants and trees in their natural environments, focusing on Iraq and Turkey.
Michele Rodda is a taxonomist at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, who specializes in the Apocynaceae of Southeast Asia and neighboring regions. He is the curator of exhibitions at the Garden’s botanical art gallery and he has written a book on botanical illustration in Singapore (Tropical Plants in Focus: Botanical Illustration at the Singapore Botanic Gardens), and he is a hobbyist printmaker.
Martin Slivka is a London-based photographer.
