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.
