Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 10

Figure 2. Aestas/Summer, from The Four Seasons,
17th century, engraving, History of Medicine Collection,
Duke University School of Medicine.
Figure 3. Martha Glowacki (American, b. 1950), Growing
Towards the Light (detail), 2015–2016, steel, bronze, cast iron,
wood, pigments, inkjet prints, size varies. Photo Mike Rebholz.
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Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections
plant “prunus.” 2 (Glowacki, with her fabricated botany,
also experiments with composites such as these.)
When separated into different images, the phases often
operated allegorically to relate to the chronological ex-
panse of human life. In a series of seventeenth-century
copperplate engravings of The Four Seasons, interactive
and multilayered prints with flaps cycle through the
flowering, bearing fruit, and defoliation of trees, which
happens alongside the maturation, reproduction, and
aging of a woman and a man (Figure 2). 3 It is haunting
to look upon such accelerated processions from pudgy
infancy to skeletal remains. Prior to the earthworks of
the 1960s, in which landscape was allowed to stand for
itself, art was never particularly well suited to docu-
menting slow change.

In graphic media, translations of observations with
the strokes of a pen, the washes of watercolor with a
brush, or the cuts of an incising knife, stabilized certain
features. In order to record, the artist’s gaze remained
active while the image that he or she attained prohibit-
ed the depicted specimen from showing any responsive-
ness to wind, water, or the sun’s rays. As if to rebuff the
notion of a page-bound image as immobilizing, in one
of her pieces, Growing Towards the Light, Glowacki has
drawn upon the illustrations of phototropic response
in Charles Bonnet’s 1754 Recherches sur l’usage des feuilles
dans les plantes as the basis for her construction of a
crank-pulley with a string that can raise the stem of a
plant (Figures 3 and 4). 4 The ability of the mechanism
to lift and lower the fabricated flower resuscitates
the experimentation described in Bonnet’s book by
responding to the words and static image on the page
with a sculptural assemblage that invites interaction.
But in the long history of botanical illustration, the
absence of a pictorial vocabulary for speaking to vegetal
movement located pictures of plants in a peculiar zone;
specimens remain both eternally alert and look as
though they have hastened to a kind of rigor mortis—
as the paradoxical term “still life” (from the Dutch