Holding Fragments 2019

Description

The central element of Naomi Draper’s installation Holding Fragments is composed of thousands of pressed Daucus Carota flowers, known commonly as Queen Anne’s Lace. These plants were gathered from sites around the city of Pittsburgh over the last two months and are woven together to form an interlaced structure of fabric.

Draper’s practice investigates processes of collecting, preserving, and archiving. Working through slow repetitive and meticulous methods of construction she attempts to stretch and consolidate the associative potential of natural particles and fragments harvested from our landscape.

The work references a diverse range of research sources that are centered around botany and botanical activity throughout history. Exploring the relationship between human and plant species, Draper is drawn to the scale, energy, intention, and ambition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century botanical endeavors and developments, when the natural landscape was viewed as a place of wonder and discovery.

While landscape is defined as “all the visible features of an area”, Draper is interested in the notion of landscape as a surface, a covering or veneer. Her artwork considers what it might be concealing and what it might hold. How a closer engagement with these natural materials might lead us to an interior space, slowly revealing the potential and possibility of this space, as a place to shelter the precious and yield that which is valuable; a bank, an archive, a sanctuary.