- Catherine Alice Michaelis: "Astronauts love earth so much
"they choose to leave it.
"For comfort, they carry with them
"earthlings of other species.
"Zinnia is an ideal companion,
"because it is good to look at, as well as good to eat.
"Dear zinnia, can you feel the floating inside you?
"Your head turns towards the Sun again and again.
You know it's your home star, singular and true."
It's a poem by Clare Elliot Lilliston.
I asked Clare if she would just write me something
about nature, and I didn't give her any parameters.
And she came back to me
with wanting to write about zinnias in space.
I got really excited and a little scared
because we're not really used to thinking about space
as nature, but the more I thought about it,
of course, space is nature.
It's like, how are we defining nature?
Is it the limit of what we're looking at when we see green
and when we see trees, when we see wildlife?
Or is it everything?
And I think nature is both inside us and outside us.
And that there is no limit to what nature is.
I remember my very first trip out to the Pacific Northwest,
going into the rainforest, going to the beaches.
It was really important for me.
And it really helped develop my appreciation of the area,
and my love of nature grew out of that.
Before I met Bill, he was studying plant medicine.
And together, we've both worked to create this garden.
We brought in a lot of ferns.
A lot of the Mahonias.
A lot of plants that were native.
We do the best that we can, but we're not indigenous
to this particular corner of the world
and neither are all of the plants.
- Bill Moody: I am so inspired just by watching her process
and the way she creates and what generates that creativity.
It's constantly evolving.
It starts off with this little idea
and then it just grows and grows and grows
and then it morphs into something else,
and then it becomes this beautiful finished product.
- I'm just mixing some transparency in
with some silver ink.
Okay, I'm gonna put it on the press now.
The idea of Aster Nautica
was to have things looking like they're floating in space.
This is the silver print run
that made the light-colored leaves that go through here.
So I wanna give the plexiglass a good coat of ink.
Here's the leaves.
Each leaf was glued to a piece of paper,
and then I cut around it just to help it
be a little stronger and reinforce it.
Often I'm gonna pick up a leaf and I'm gonna press it
maybe just for a couple of days.
The greener it is, the longer the life in the press,
but if it's too green,
it's just gonna squirt chlorophyll out
in the pressing process.
And then I just roll it over,
and it's really clear
that the leaves there are making the print here.
So four print runs before the type went on it,
and they're all pressure printed.
[chiming music]
"Letterpress printed under the moon's wax and wane
at May Day Press, April 2016."
I chose the name May Day Press,
not just because I was born on May Day,
but I got my first press on May Day.
Rayna Holtz was my letterpress teacher.
And she was a big influence for me as a teacher,
but also an influence on what a press should be.
This idea of having some kind of mission
or theme that you built your work around.
When I got my own press and I had to make my very first book,
I had to start with a book that honored my grandmother
and our Cherokee heritage.
She was just such a beautiful person.
She took in every stray plant, every stray animal.
She raised three of her grandchildren.
Everybody loved her.
This is what I thought it meant to be Cherokee.
This was what I thought it meant to be a good person
in the world.
And so I wanted to honor that with my first project.
I designed Book: A Cherokee Primer.
I chose this bark paper that's hand-beaten
by Indigenous people in Mexico.
On the inside, there's images from nature.
And I wanted the words in Cherokee
and English underneath them.
I spent a lot of time drawing the letters,
and I then carved them in linoleum
and printed them onto the paper.
As I was learning about the Cherokee language,
I also learned about Sequoyah
and his invention of the written Cherokee.
If the Cherokee language could be written,
then it would help keep the Cherokee culture alive.
That was Sequoyah's vision.
And that's what I was trying to do too.
I was trying to keep it alive in me and in our family.
And so it felt important
to bring that piece of history forward
and put it in the book.
[gentle music]
Bill and I got really interested in the
eco-printing process on paper.
And we've spent a lot of time collecting plants
and putting them through this transfer process on the paper.
- Plants contain many pigments.
By putting them in contact with the paper
and we bundle them up and rubber band them pretty tightly,
and they go in the pot and we apply heat.
It releases the pigments from the plants
and it's absorbed by the paper.
Weighted down and...
- There we go.
All through the seasons, we're collecting different things
because new plants are coming up, new plants are blooming,
new plants are going to seed,
all these different things are happening.
And so it really gave us a chance to experiment
and create different looks from one month to the next
all throughout the year.
We're always oohing and aahing over the papers.
- It's like a Christmas gift.
You never know what you gonna get until you open it up.
- It's always exciting.
There's always something new.
We decided to create a book.
It's called Solar Return
and is really about showcasing these papers,
being very dramatic with them and subtle with them
and sorting them by seasons.
I think that nature is an experience.
It's very experiential.
It's very sensorial and sensual.
And when we make art about it, we're fixing it.
And I want it to stay alive as much as I can.
I want my own experience of nature
to keep expanding and growing.
I decided I would do a book
and have it be called Erotica Botanica.
I just had the title.
And I thought, "Oh, maybe just every now and then,
you'll discover a little nature-based quote."
But while I was looking for the text,
I just had a hard time finding something that I wanted.
I decided, "I guess I just have to write some erotica
about the botanica."
So because it was embarrassing, I think I decided all of this
was going to be from the viewpoint of the flowers
and their pollinators.
So each of these little verses
is a different pollination method.
[gentle music]
You may or may not know that when you read it.
You may just think it's erotica,
but they're meant to be really true.
[birds chirping]
When I was creating the visual design,
I wanted it to be very leafy and sensual.
So I have these pages
that are shaped like leaves that fold over each other
and you get little glimpses through them.
And the paper is very sensual to the touch.
I spent hours and hours just doing my artwork
and sitting in the garden
because that's what the book is about.
It's about nature.
And the best way to understand nature
is to spend time in it,
whether it's the bird sound or the colors of the flowers
or the smell of the plants, it's all really important to me.
And it all, I think becomes imbued in the process.
[gentle music]
"Dear space, can we call you nature
"so many miles above atmosphere?
"Still, we put ourselves in the center of it,
"the air that is not air, the vacuum, the void,
"the possible impossible.
We put ourselves there and bring the flowers with us."
[gentle music]