Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. My dissertation subject is a seventeenth-century book category that most would regard as the florilegium, or sometimes loosely called the flower book. They are collections of botanical illustrations, mostly images of garden flowers. Depending on who you ask, they are often argued to be simply the coffee table book of the past with little to no scientific value. My approach to these images is to look at them from a more holistic perspective. I ask how they played into different types of engagement with plants in the past – such as their relation to gardening and other botanical publications of the time.
My contribution to this discussion is bringing different branches of knowledge together to examine these beautiful botanical watercolors from the seventeenth century. How did you first become interested in researching these seventeenth-century flower books? The interest came from my own artistic practice. Making Colors (6): Space and Resources in Historical Remaking - Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen. *This blog post is part of the series Making Colors. The historical remaking research of my project is supported by the generous grant from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Among all the aspects of historical remaking, the space for conducting experiments may be the most ahistorical one. The recipes to reconstruct are directly from the past. Even though the interpretation of recipes is modern, historians and researchers are trained to carefully contextualize historical text within the period in which a recipe was written or recorded.
The workspace for remaking experiments, on the other hand, usually does not resemble a historical studio or workshop in its appearance. Fig. 1. A few months into routinely experimenting in the lab came the semi-lockdown in the Netherlands due to the Covid-19. In a way, converting my shared living room into a home lab became a transhistorical experience of working in a maker’s studio or workshop. Fig. 2.