Plant-based and other Polyphenol Prints
I first came across the idea of plant-based polyphenol prints in the work of the artist, Christina McBride. Christina is a colleague at Glasgow School of Art and fellow member of the research group, Reading Landscape. For her 2023 exhibition, Críocha an Chroí / Heartland, Christina produced a beautiful body of photographs using sustainable photographic developers made from Bracken, Ling Heather, Sphagnum Moss and various seaweeds.
For my own initial experiments I mixed up some Caffenol, a well documented recipe of instant coffee, washing soda (Sodium Carbonate) and powdered vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid).
Since then I have begun to test the potential efficacy of different plants growing in my untidy garden. As I started this in January, there wasn’t much greenery about. I first tried some evergreen Leylandii, which seemed to work, but the smell was so overpowering that I didn’t pursue refining the recipe. However, since then I have had good results, for both film and paper developer, from the died-back foliage from last years ferns. I based this on a Stinging Nettle recipe, by the prodigious plant developer blogger and film maker Dagie Brundert.
Following on from the dead fern recipe, I gathered lichen that had blown off local trees and fence posts. This proved particularly effective…
Looking around for other ingredients to try, I noticed all the shrivelled up and partly rotted rosehips on a reverted rosebush in the front garden. Since rosehips are so rich in vitamin C, I wondered if these would provide both the phenolic compounds and ascorbic acid required for the a working developer. I tried a couple of batches, increasing in strength, in which sodium carbonate was added to a ‘rosehip tea’, but no vitamin C was added. The results were interesting, but unstable and inconsistent, until supplemented with extra vitamin C. It could just be that these hips were too old and withered, having wintered on the bush, and the vitamin C content had degraded. It will be interesting to repeat this experiment again, with fresh rosehips, later in the year.
