I want to find alternative and non‐toxic ways for making prints using materials available at the location. Traditional print‐making and photo-printing methods usually involve toxic chemicals, so I want to experiment with natural materials and non‐toxic materials. I have recently been using tea, coffee, plants, and vegetables to make inks. 

In his work on the photosynthetic production and dark utilization of starch in green plants, Julius von Sachs (1864) demonstrated that light was required for starch formation in green plants. He was able to capture fairly stable images of photosynthetic action, using an iodine stain, which disclosed starch in leaves by forming blue or violet granules. Molisch (1914) expanded on von Sachs’ work by developing ‘starch pictures’ in intact leaves by using actual photographic negatives as masks over the illuminated leaves. The starch is analogous to silver grains in a conventional photograph or pixels in digital images. Along these lines, British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been creating art installations since 1990 in which they project pictures onto large panels of grass. This results in reproductions of the images in green and yellow tones depending on the amount of chlorophyll produced in the grass. 

My aim is to capture the images that are generated by bio-functional chlorophyll on paper. I am currently experimenting with different methods of transferring images from living plant leaves to paper. I want to combine the methods of photosynthetic production with more conventional methods of printmaking and photograms.