M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Gregory Pryor
Dryandra cryptophala, 2002 � Gregory Pryor
fire in the south west of Western Australia, opened up
to release it’s seed.
As scientifically flimsy as my observations were, it
did, nonetheless prompt what was eventually to become
Black Solander. This Banksia specimen seemed to
continue it’s fight for survival, despite being cut from it’s
host plant, squashed and dried between paper,
transported to the other side of the world, dipped in
poison, taped down and housed in darkness, before
surviving the devastating consequences of a world war.
This was an example of inexplicable growth and survival
from within a crypt.
By now, I realized that my paltry 200 drawings
could not encompass what I had in mind. I wanted to
somehow present the immense floral diversity and
intensity of Western Australia and simultaneously sound
an alarm about its threatened status. Ironically, I also
realized that the moment the first specimens arrived
back in Europe from the early voyages of exploration to
terra australis, was also the moment when the
decimation of the diversity that the Linnaean binomial
system was set up to classify, really began. I wanted to
build a receptacle that housed these seemingly
contradictory aims.
My plans matured subliminally when I returned
to Perth and it was only when my car drove me to the
herbarium that they announced themselves. I left the fire
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Gregory Pryor
Banksia lemanniana Meisn. 2006 � Gregory Pryor
extinguisher, walked back to reception and asked, “Who
should I talk to if I want to do a drawing of every species
of flowering plant in Western Australia?”
Botanical illustrators conventionally paint the
flower in an idealized form – in good health, clear light
and often in every stage of its life cycle. I wanted to make
a work from the discards of such botanical illustration.
Herbariums shut out light, repel pollinating insects and
flatten form, making desiccated plants behave like printed
text. These plants have been extinguished from the
biomass of the world, given a Latin name and been
refashioned as books.
Daniel Solander, a pupil of Linnaeus, designed a
box to store his dried specimens in when he traveled on
The Endeavour to Australia in the late eighteenth century.
A similar box is still in use in many museums today and
now bears his name – the Solander box. Operating like a
portable herbarium, this lightproof container was just the
type of receptacle I needed, except it had to
accommodate 10,500 specimens. The Perth Institute of
Contemporary Arts offered me a ‘box’ big enough to
complete the task.
To convey this absence of light and the
increasingly rapid waning of the flora in these uncertain
times, I decided to work with black ink on ‘black’ paper. I
painted each plant on low grade sugar paper, because of
it’s fugitive dyes so that during the course of making the
work, the paper gradually lost its colour in varying
degrees. Considering that the large scale collecting of
Australian plants really gathered momentum at the start
of Queen Victoria’s reign, I also felt my mausoleum