Botanical Blueprint

The fragmentary silhouettes of local plants featured in Botanical Blueprint were inspired by the cyanotypes—contact prints on sun-sensitive paper—that Buffalo-born and Richmond-based artist Hillary Waters Fayle created in collaboration with visitors to the 25th anniversary edition of Garden Walk Buffalo in July 2019. Describing the project, Fayle has said,

“I want to salvage and revive our individual and collective connection to the natural world. . . . [using] found botanical and organic material . . . to symbolically bind nature and the human touch. Our connection to the land is so obvious in gardens, on a windowsill or a backyard or a farm, where plants nourish our bodies and souls. They connect us in a very tangible way to the land. . . . Plants are a marker of place, a connection to the land and to our past; native or invasive, the plants of our homes feel like old friends to us.”