“If you can collect enough sap from a female fern, it will confer
eternal youth if drunk.
Burning ferns as incense will help you contact the dead or call
upon assistance from the spiritual realms. Dried and thrown
upon hot coals, ferns will exorcise evil spirits.
Fern ash dissolved in pure water which then evaporates, will
turn into crystals shaped as fern fronds.
Seeds are carried for invisibility.”
Filicology - Angle 20 (2017)
24 pages, 20x14,8 cm, 360 ex.
Angle 1-90° series, Multipress Forlag, Oslo
The book is an investigation into the history, mythology and traditions surrounding the fern. The project sparked by a quote in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “Fern ash dissolved in pure water which then evaporates, will turn into crystals shaped as fern fronds.” Filicology: the science and study of ferns, which developed into a pteridomania, or “fern fever” during the Victorian era.
About the project, Multipress Forlag:
“Andrea Grundt Johns’ photographs shuttle between deconstruction and reconstruction. She works consistently with the empty and transitory aspects of photography – as visual traces of something that is vanishing. In Filicology she studies the fern. Throughout history this useful plant has served a number of purposes, including the making of glass and protection against evil spirits and powers. Charred ferns were transformed into crystals, and according to ancient folk belief fern seeds could make you invisible. Burning fern leaves as incense can put you in contact with the dead and the spirit world. Through references to superstition and ancient knowledge, as opposed to the coldly technical approach, a mythical framework is created around the plant – spirituality and the cultic forces of nature trickle through.
Grundt Johns’ pictures have been described as “cameraless and sculptural photography”, and she takes an intuitive and experimental approach. The pictures in Filicology have been created among other ways by colouring botanical paper with fern water. The characteristic fan-shaped leaves of the fern spread out in compositions where negative black areas are contoured indistinctly against light ones like shadows. In other places almost imperceptible patches of colour seem grafted on to the paper itself, with a characteristic patina. The burnt ferns contain[LU1] ash. A number of these pictures have a dark, heavy substantiality captured by Grundt Johns through the use of the sensory contrasts of photography.”
Where to buy it
In Norway (may be subject to change)
Oslo: Tronsmo, Kunstnernes hus
Bergen: Bergen Kunstforening, Hordaland Kunstsenter
Lillehammer: B*stard kunstbokhandel v/ Oppland Kunstforening
International & online
Mulitpress Forlag
IACK, Kanazawa, Japan
Contact me directly
