Many plants have a remarkable ability to survive and thrive in the most inauspicious places such as a dried up bank of a reservoir, the cracks in a pavement or amongst the fag ends and litter on a street planter. These images were made from photographs of plants discovered in a local shopping street. They celebrate the work of Wylliam Turner of Morpeth who printed ‘A New Herball’ in 1551 and is considered to be the father of English botany. His illustrations are simple but elegant fine line drawings cut on wood block, often four prints to the page. My photographs have been converted to stark black in white bitmaps. Modern technology and new materials like photopolymer coated mylar plates have enabled me to create embossing plates bringing a third dimension of texture and depth of the printed illustrations. The force required to create the embossed image also acknowledges the strength of the emerging plants.

Artist Gallery

Chris Madge

Since retiring from my work producing Photography in Education projects across the northern region I have been experimenting with making digital negatives for printmaking using alternative photographic processes including gum bichromate and solar plate photogravure. More recently I have been converting photographs into bitmap images to make plates for embossed image printing and I have used this process to make a plate for this exhibition.

The inspiration for this work came from discovering The New Herball of Wylliam Turner of Morpeth, an early book of botanical illustrations printed in 1551. The source images were ta