ELIZABETH ROZMANITH

Bionetworks

So, this project is called Bionetworks. For the series, I wanted to try out a process of Japanese woodblock printing with watercolor inks called moku hanga, in which you carve separate wood blocks for each layer of color in your print, soak the block in water, and then place a layer of nori paste and inks on it and hand-register it on the paper. When I was developing the imagery for the prints, I had recently been learning more about things such as how trees share nutrients and about how mycelia, which are fungi roots, provide networks of communication between the fungi. This theme was especially moving to me because thinking about these networks and feeling how we as humans are a part of them was reassuring at a time where we were isolated in the middle of the pandemic. I also thought there was something poetic about using wood as the material to print images of trees and roots, to bring the material back to where it originated from. The first image is depicting crown shyness, which is when trees allow for a bit of space in
between their crowns, so the canopy has these little channel-like gaps. I printed it with a sort of reverse coloring, so the “leaves” are blue, and the sky is yellow orange, to make those channels stand out and sort of question your comprehension of the image. The second image is of mycelia, which are fungus roots, and this image was printed with 6 separately carved wood blocks. And for the last image, I was thinking about how we – humans – have turned our backs on nature and caused a lot of destruction, but nature is still trying to reach out to us and help us correct our ways and return to our roots. I think what is most important is to remember that we ARE nature,
because when we remember that, we’re a little less lost, and we can channel empathy for the trees, and the fungi, and the networks that are calling to us and begin to heal the destruction we’ve caused.