Understorey
A Year Among Weeds
by Anna Chapman Parker
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Pub Date Jun 06 2024 | Archive Date Jun 05 2024
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Description
A beautiful and highly original artist's diary of a year spent observing wild plants
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In Understorey, artist and writer Anna Chapman Parker records in prose and stunning original line drawings a year spent looking closely at weeds, our most ubiquitous and accessible plants. In gardens, on verges or clustered around municipal lampposts, weeds offer a year-round spectacle of wildlife. The benefits to us of being among greenery are well known, but what exactly are these vaguely familiar shapes that accompany our every step, yet pass beneath our notice? How and when do they emerge, bloom and subside, and what would it mean to notice them?
Meditating too on how they appear in other artists’ work, from a bramble framing a sixth-century Byzantine manuscript to a kudzu vine installation in contemporary Berlin, Chapman Parker explores the art of paying attention even to the smallest things.
Advance Praise
'A beautiful, quiet, achingly tender book. A year spent with weeds; giving voice to the exquisite and the everyday alike... It’s a reminder that the circle always turns; the light always comes back' Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
‘A year of sketching and musing on the unplanted, unplanned, unremarkable greenery that surrounds us all every day. A celebration of disorder and doing nothing – the perfect antidote to the modern belief that something only exists once it’s been captured by your phone' Ken Thompson, author of Common or Garden
'A delicately written study of the joys and difficulties of paying attention' Jessie Greengrass, author of The High House
'Anna Chapman Parker weaves together art history, botany, ecosystems, and the routines of everyday life in this gracefully illuminating account of a year drawing weeds. Through the shifting seasons, Chapman Parker’s drawings and prose reveal the extraordinary value of plants that are generally taken for granted, ignored, or obliterated, and the power of stopping to look carefully, pen in hand' Alixe Bovey, Dean and Deputy Director at The Courtauld
'What a brilliant idea, to fit into the interstices of days full of work and two children, the very plants that are themselves so good at filling the interstices of our daily lives. The attention that Anna Chapman Parker has given to the ordinary weeds surrounding her, both in drawings and words, gives them a heightened glamour, presence and worth' Ruth Pavey, author of A Wood of One's Own
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9780715655207 |
PRICE | £18.99 (GBP) |
PAGES | 288 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Author-artist Anna Chapman Parker has written a gorgeous book on her experience of observing wild plants for a year in Northern England. Her illustrations, quietly powerful, capture life in a moment and as she observes, we do too, slowing life down to a heartbeat. Will purchase this for my personal library and give it to friends who have embraced slow living. A gem!