With spring continuing to drag on into J-U-L-Y, not everyone is hoping for warmer, dryer weather. Rachel Dein, a plaster and concrete artist out of London, embraces the spring weather as it provides the perfect medium for her plant-based art. She’s out and about, foraging her favourite materials – wildflowers. Then, acting quickly, she gently presses the fresh blooms into clay, removing them to create an impression, then pours plaster into the mold to make panels of art that are as precious as the original specimens themselves. “With a tinge of sepia, the castings recall the slightly out-of-this-world look of platinum photographic prints brought into the third dimension. As light casts shadows on the relief, the plants take on an ethereal form, a haunting memory of their natural selves that have withered and vanished. Like a fossil of long forgotten plants, each plaque is a ghostly vestige of time, an act of remembering: a summer day in the garden, a perfect magnolia at its peak, or the first daffodils in spring.” Rachel Dein. A process that has been around and practiced since Leonardo DaVinci, early botanists used nature printing to record the plants they collected, and were able to share existing species and compare against new discoveries. Dein has added her own personal touch and composition to each piece, and can be as simple as a single stem, or as complex as a field of wildflowers, leaves, and grasses. “Pendulous bleeding hearts, curly fiddleheads of ferns, and wispy poppies are some of her favorite flowers to cast, for they preserve a fleeting moment of glory long after the plants have faded and died”. Ngoc Minh Ngo