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Before the academy, my projects were mostly about nature and my relation to nature. At that moment I had a hard time explaining why I wanted to do my projects about a natural environment and what I saw in them. But now that I'm older and I understand my work better I can see what I was trying to do back then.

The theme of these practices reminded me of something I used to think about a lot and still do, our relationship to nature. This led me to think about how I can visualize my relationship with nature while also help myself find some peace within our current situation.

This reminded me of an exhibition I saw in Foam around 2016 of a photographer who lived and studies isolation within nature.

The work of Awoiska van der Molen gave me some inspiration about what I wanted to do for this project.

# 394-18-2015 copyright Awoiska van der Molen

While I will revisit old work and reuse previous projects I also want to add an extra layer to my photographic work by combining my current style of working with using cyanotypes to visualize the beauty I find in nature.

I got this inspiration from an exhibition i once saw in Rijksmuseum with the Cyanotypes of Anna Atkins.

Because of the inspiration, I got from the work of Anna Atkins I also wanted to create cyanotypes to experiment with the medium and gain new inspirations for the project.

By creating the cyanotypes myself, I started wondering if there was a way in which I could elevate the medium to something that is more then just a photograph. This chain of thought made me realize that the plants I used for the cyanotypes probably have more properties to it then I was aware of at the time. This gave me the inspiration that I wanted to use the cyanotypes that I made to educate or give a message to the viewer so that they would also reconnect with nature in the same way I was reconnecting by researching these plants. This led me to the book written by Leoniek Bontje about plants in our surroundings that have medical properties in which I could research the additional properties these plants might have.

While discussing my current findings and direction of my project with a friend he said to me that because my project is an art form, I could find more spiritual meaning behind the plants instead of using the scientific approach to create more depth in my project. This inspired me to create an imaginary plant and herb archive of mental healing plants in which I use the plants as a metaphor to give mental healing advice. Because by healing ourselves mentally we become closer to ourselves and therefore also closer to nature.

When I started researching if there also a spiritual side to the plants which goes further then medical healing, I learned that most plants are connected to our solar system and our zodiac signs. This opened my mind to new possibilities that I could achieve with the cyanotypes. While researching the spiritual meaning of the plants I noticed that most of the magical powers came from the medieval ages and witchcraft. This gave me a lot of inspiration on how to give extra design to the cyanotypes.

When discussing my findings with a good friend of mine she hinted me about tarot cards, and how I could apply the way tarot cards work to my cyanotypes. In this way, I could relay a simple spiritual message to the viewer of the card.

In the end, I couldn't find a suitable way to combine my research and project, so I've decided to just leave them somewhere for somebody to find in the hope that it will sparkle their curiosity and research the subject for themselves. I feel like if I had more time I could have done more to combine the research and the end work. But for now, the idea of leaving it somewhere for someone to find and continue it also appeals to me. My first idea of the presentation was to put the cyanotypes up in a tree, I found this idea interesting because it would allow people to gather my works. I realized that my work would possibly pollute more than doing anything different to in the end i choose to put it in a collection box that is near my house.