M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Gregory Pryor
Herbarium, Naturhistorisches museum, Vienna, 2004 � Gregory
Pryor
millennia to adapt to the harsh climate and the depleted
soil. In adapting, many of these flowers had formed
spectacular flowering shapes and highly complex
germination strategies. (2)
Because I couldn’t understand what I was looking
at, I began to take photographs and after 4 weeks I had
compiled about 200 images of different species of flower.
This seemed incredible to me, but little did I know that
there were around 8,000 species in the south west of
Western Australia and I was merely scratching the
surface of this amazing flora in one of the world’s 25
designated bio-diversity hot spots.
These photographs then accompanied me to
Vienna, where I found out that the herbarium of the
Naturhistorisches museum had a very strong historical
collection of Western Australian plants. This was my first
encounter with a herbarium collection, and the sheer
size of the collection was overwhelmingly evident, with
rows and rows of cabinets and shelving and tables and
benches stacked high with piles of pressed and dried
plants, yellowing paper and discolored cardboard, empty
labels and tabs poking out from paper folders as if to
tout for business. I was told the holdings in Vienna
consisted of about four million specimen sheets.
The director generously offered me a desk to
work at, but warned me about the toxicity of the
environment if I was to work in the archive. The building
was bombed during the second world war and most of
the windows shattered, thereby exposing the fragile
collection to attack by museum beetle and a host of
other insects that could easily decimate huge amount of
the holdings very quickly. As a result, apparently the
liberating American troops were asked to spray the
entire building with DDT. I was told it was extremely
difficult to remove and was shown the rather beautiful
crystalline surface on the inside of one of the cabinets.
As I began cross-referencing my naïve little
snapshots of flowers with these world and time-weary
specimens, I continued to be drawn into the aesthetics of
decay and how messy, imprecise and desperate the
visual language of classification can be. Many very old
specimens seemed to be suffocated with dust and age
and, as I was to find out, poisoned with various
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Gregory Pryor
Page from Herbarium Vivum, Joanne Baptista Flysser, (1696)
Slovenian Natural History Museum, 2004 � Gregory Pryor
substances to keep insects away. Mercuric chloride was
one of the most common poisons that the plants were
bathed in and this often left spectral stains on the
mounting paper. If a specimen had prized itself free from
its mounting paper and disappeared, often an ‘afterimage’
remained. I began to wonder if plants had souls.
The deeper I navigated into the stacks of dried
and poisoned plants in Vienna, the more I realized that I
needed to make a substantial work about the flora of
Western Australia. Speculative and incoherent sketches
soon gave way to very detailed tracings from the
specimen sheets which corresponded to my
photographs.
A critical breakthrough occurred however when
I encountered one of the very old specimens of the
Banksia genera. This specimen sheet prompted thoughts
about a census of plants that are archived through time,
smoke and charcoal. The plant was in poor condition
and the mounting paper significantly discolored with
what looked like sooty grime. A lot of loose material was
also evident and after closer examination, I realized that
amongst the detached fragments were the seeds (which
are carried by wafer thin ‘wings’) that are ejected from
the cone of the Banksia when fire engulfs the plant,
thereby ensuring the continuation of it’s genetic line. It
then occurred to me that the darkened specimen sheet
could possibly be smoke damaged from the wartime fires
and the valves in the Banksia cone, thinking that it was a