· By Studio
A Thicket of Briars
On crafting a wallpaper from 1500 years of brambles by Anna Chapman Parker.
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In winter, brambles’ thorny loops gleam purplish, bare of all but the scrappiest leaves, a darkly exuberant tangle that props up the collapsing remnants of other plants. New shoots get going before the year is out, propelling the season forward. By March, there is no visible beginning or end to the plant. Each stem arcs upwards as if testing gravity: the curve finds its apex, falls, re-roots, begins again. Blossom arrives in early summer, the flowers blushing pink and bearing centres of stamens as profuse as roses’ (a giveaway that they are from the same Rosaceae family). This plant lines so many of our pavements and field edges, its arching stems making a wild running stitch that tacks the country together – at least vegetatively.
I made many drawings of brambles on my walks, but quickly found that the only way to draw them is to look at a detail. Those mad arching stems can’t be contained on a single sheet of paper; they make the rectangle of a page seem absurd. But the thing about wallpaper is that it doesn’t have to stop. A wallpaper’s repeat can acknowledge the plant’s looping habit: it goes on and on, joining up with what’s gone before, silently continuous. Drawing a plant into a wallpaper can give it a different kind of time.
I became a bit obsessed with the brambles, and the fact that they crop up everywhere made it worse. But though I knew I wanted to make a bramble wallpaper, I didn’t want to use any drawing I had made from life. The plant was too untameable to be contorted into an obediently repeating pattern. I had, however, seen a drawing someone else had done a long time ago which I thought could work. It was in a 6th century manuscript, a pharmacopeia or herbal by the ancient Greek physician and botanist Dioscorides.
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It was also season-less. The plant in the drawing has leaves, but its main stems are wintry-bare; the tips are flowering as if it’s high summer, but as you move down the stem the flowers are replaced by autumn berries, like a time-lapse recorded in a still image. The bramble stretches upward with youthful vigour, but its lowest shoot has already rooted and begun to create a daughter plant. Everything a bramble does throughout the year is there, distilled into a single drawing. And it still seems to be in motion, reaching up to the light.
We don’t know who drew the blackberry in the Vienna Dioscorides. It is one of 383 images in that manuscript, and their variety of styles suggest that numerous artists were involved. Most - maybe all - of the images were copied from earlier drawings rather than drawn from life. Two other manuscripts of Dioscorides’ herbal, now in Naples (7th c.) and New York (10th c.), depict brambles with very similar structure and shape to the Vienna one: the same arrangement of flowering tips and rooting stems, and even the same snapping stalk at the right-hand edge. It’s now thought that all three manuscripts may have been copied from an even older book that has not survived.
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In my studio I began by extracting stems from the later two manuscript drawings, cutting them out on my computer screen like some kind of digital horticulturalist, grafting new plants. I wanted to incorporate them into my drawing of the Vienna bramble, acknowledging the image’s history and reach and adding another layer of complexity. I also needed new stems to create the pattern repeat. The digital collage then became the source for my own re-drawing. Working on paper placed over the grafted stems on a lightbox, I drew in black ink with small horizontal lines, a transcribing mark, but working in negative.
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My final wallpaper is based on Juliana Anicia’s blackberry, but with stems from later manuscripts woven in. So, the three brambles from across the centuries, now residing in libraries across continents, have entwined themselves into a thicket. Thicket is available at CommonRoom in Daylight and Moonlight. Anna has a new edition of 25 beautiful prints What Happens When Nothing Happens available in A1 and A2, exclusively at CommonRoom.