All About Orchids

In the aftermath of 9/11, New Yorkers searched for their own ways to return to normalcy, the reassurance of the way things were. For artist Jane Kent, who joined UVMs Department of Art as an assistant professor last fall, this meant immersing herself in the creative process. From her Tribeca home, just five blocks from the World Trade Center, Kent would travel to her 39th Street studio and spend the day drawing orchids.
It was incredibly restorative, just to sit there in this very small universe drawing these orchids for hours and hours and hours, Kent says.
A printmaker and abstract painter, Kent found that the act of making these drawings was a critical step in adapting author Susan Orleans The Orchid Thief into an artists book titled The Orchid Thief Reimagined. Some 100 drawings emerged from the process, along with a sharpened strategy for the book.
This is why these projects are so great, because you actually get to figure it out, Kent says. It grew like a plant.
The completed piece consists of eight unbound screenprinted pages, which combine Kents art with Orleans words, and eight sheets of printed interleaving, all nestled in a silk-covered box. An edition of 35 was co-published by Grenfell Press and the Rhode Island School of Design, number six of which is at home in UVMs Special Collections.
Artist/AuthorThere are many approaches to artists books, Kent says. When she considered creating one, she drew inspiration from a Jasper Johns-Samuel Beckett book called Foirades/Fizzles.
It was a combination of text and image, Kent says, but it wasnt an illustrated text. It wasnt a case of words and pictures that would reiterate the words. That wasnt my interest.
Kent was a lecturer in printmaking at Princeton University in the late 1970s when she met writer Richard Ford, author of novels such as The Sportswriter and Independence Day. They discussed the possibility of doing an artists book together, but as they both pursued other directions that notion would take a long time to germinate. In the mid-1990s, Kent got serious about an artists book and got in touch with Ford. They collaborated in 2000 on a portofolio with seven Kent etchings complementing Fords story Privacy. Kent plans a future project with Ford working from a memoir of his mother.
The artist says she is always on the lookout for unusual or evocative writing and found it in the 1998 creative nonfiction book The Orchid Thief. She starts out with this story about a man on trial. From there she goes on to every subject in the universe and it just mutates and turns in on itself, Kent says. And that, I thought, was very compatible with my work. I always start out with a pretty singular form, and it mutates and mutates and mutates through the effort of working.
Orlean was immediately receptive to Kents proposal and took on the job of selecting the passages that would go into The Orchid Thief Reimagined. The project with Kent was evolving at the same time Orlean was working with movie producers on the film Adaptation, in which screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (with the authors blessing) takes outrageous liberties including depicting Orlean in ways unsavory and untrue. Not surprisingly given this, Kent found the writer generous and liberal in how she would allow her work to be reinterpreted. The art professor notes that sections Orlean selected for the artists book closely match passages spoken by Meryl Streep in the role of Orlean in Adaptation.
Picking through the densityIts worth a visit to Special Collections to fully appreciate The Orchid Thief Reimagined. Taken from their box and pieced together, the colorful screenprinted pages and sheets of interleaving, printed in black monotone, reunite as a whole. For the sheets of interleaving, a convention in artists books to protect the printed pages (something like that slip of tissue in a wedding invitation), Kent worked from an old engraving of an orchid-hunting scene. She had the image digitally enlarged, then interpreted it in arabesque shapes, not unlike the patterns on the screenprinted text sheets. Cut into eight separate sheets, the mystery of these pages deepens until they are pieced back together to reveal an image of thick jungle.
Though Kent didnt set out to reiterate words with pictures, she does capture both theme and mood with such techniques. Going through the swamp, looking for this thing in this density, says Kent. Its a way of dealing with the fact that you have to go through dense, muddy forest to come upon the jewel of the orchidif youre so lucky.

Article Sources:
Finding the Orchid : UVM The View
Finding the Orchid : UVM The View
Jay's Key West Orchid Species Collecting Page
ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID (PG-13 [R-13]): CAP Movie ...
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