Image courtesy of Leslie Koptcho.
“Giant Salvinia.”
“Giant Salvinia,” part of Leslie Koptcho's "Botanica Collectanea" series.
Artist Leslie Koptcho’s process begins in her backyard on the banks of Bayou Duplantier, where she can spot an invasive plant every direction she looks. There’s Japanese climbing fern, paper mulberry, giant salvinia, water hyacinth, alligator weed, and countless others. These notorious plants, each destructive in its own way here in Louisiana, are the subject of Koptcho’s latest project, Botanica Collectanea.
Koptcho has worked in printmaking for decades now, treating the artform of multiples as a medium for examining the subtleties of individuality in living organisms—much, as she describes it, “like a comparative biologist.”
Studying these invasives of the Gulf Coast region, she sees a story in each plant: there is beauty, and there is strength, despite their capacity to harm our local environment. She saw an opportunity to bring awareness to the physicality of these plants—what they actually look like and the harm they can cause—by creating prints of them.
“I find them beautiful, tenacious. They have such strong characteristics and properties.” —Leslie Koptcho
After harvesting the plants, often from her backyard, then photographing them, Koptcho photographs and draws them in various compositions based on the features she finds most intriguing—“I find them beautiful, tenacious,” she said. “They have such strong characteristics and properties.”
Courtesy of Leslie Koptcho
Paper samples, made from invasive plants by artist Leslie Koptcho
Koptcho uses intaglio printmaking techniques—etching and transferring her drawings onto copper and photopolymer plates, coating them in ink, cleaning them off, then running them through a press with paper for the final print. For Botanica Collectanea, which is funded in part by LSU’s Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research, she is creating a suite of such prints inspired by botanical studies like those in Margaret Stones’s Flora of Louisiana and The Temple of Flora by Robert John Thornton, and later by Jim Dine. To accompany each print, she is also compiling botanical notes and personal observations about the plant and its place (or imposition) in our local environment.
“I find herbals [botanical studies] especially alluring and challenging for their aesthetic qualities,” Koptcho writes in her artist’s statement. “And because they often comprise much more than basic plant identification; they can embody storytelling and magic, provide insights into cultures and place, and reveal mysterious operations of nature, malevolent or benevolent.”
Image courtesy of Leslie Koptcho.
“Mimosa”
Leslie Koptcho, “Mimosa” part of her "Botanica Collectanea" series.
Koptcho wanted to push things one step further, though. How can these plants be used, and through their use, mitigated? Each print will not only depict the invasive plants that have so captured Koptcho’s imagination but be printed on paper made from their very fibers.
“I got really excited about producing the paper itself and making an image that was not only on paper, but of paper,” she said.
Courtesy of Leslie Koptcho
For her "Botanica Collectanea" collection, artist Leslie Koptcho forages for invasive species, which she uses to make paper and as the subjects of her intaglio prints.
When I visit Koptcho in her studio in the basement of LSU’s Hatcher Hall, she has a pile of Johnson Grass arranged on a stand in front of studio lights. The fast-spreading Asian weed is known to choke out natives and crops, and to even kill livestock who eat too much of it. From a stack of multi-colored, hand-hewn papers, she pulls two different examples of the paper she’s made from the fibers—one from the leaves, one from the stems. The colors in her stack range from deep green (Hydrilla) to black (water hyacinth), and everything in between. When a plant fiber turns out to be too weak to stand as paper on its own, she’ll mix in other stronger fibers, such as paper mulberry, to create a blended result she refers to as “Swamp Paper.”
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In LSU’s papermaking studio down the hall, she’s got a pot of Asian Jasmine that has been cooking down for days. “It’s tough,” she says. “But that means it’s going to produce a nice, strong paper.” After the plant matter is sufficiently cooked down, it goes into a Hollander beater to be transformed into pulp, which is formed into sheets over a sieve, pressed, and finally dried.
Image courtesy of Leslie Koptcho.
"Hydrilla with Apple Snail Egg Cluster"
"Hydrilla with Apple Snail Egg Cluster."
Because there are no available records of anyone else turning many of these plant fibers into paper, every step is an experiment for Koptcho. “It’s like cooking,” she said. “Every plant has different properties, different cooking and beating times. I feel like a pioneer. And I can leave this research behind for future papermakers to take even further.”
