Artist Biography
Eileen Dunlop
Spring Va
Art Teaching & CFA tutor 2010 BCU MA Art practice and education 1996 C&GCHE BA Visual Art& Media Communications Specialisms: sound and smell, painting & printmaking Walked 100 miles of River Severn producing a sound and smell installation; I am inspired by environmental issues.
After some good initial chats, Kristina Stark contacted me in September 2022 and I was heading to Capetown to visit friends whom we hadn’t seen for 20 years. We decided to have a chat after I got back. My husband and I enjoyed a tour of Kirstenbosch National Botanic gardens and the King Protea were all in flower, as it was late spring. On return to my own garden in October in Gloucestershire we were experiencing a very warm autumn after a drought in the summer. A lot of plants had dropped their leaves and gone into dormancy, but I noticed several plants that looked like they were going to flower. Apparently they had been tricked into thinking it was spring. I told Kristina and she e-mailed me an article in the local papers that the cherry trees had started to flower in November in Stockholm instead of April. Christmas shoppers were encouraged to come and see the phenomenon. We both started to do some research on the effects of climate change; Kristina designed a print of a zinnia in flower in space. I tried a collagraph initially and was going to use the longitude co-ordinates, but I couldn’t manage to do the writing. I then had a weekend learning how to use the letterpress at GPC with Andy Kinnear. I used drypoint technique and decided not to use the letterpress initially I used 2 separate plates but they kept slipping, so re-designed a larger plate. I thought of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden who recorded the plants over a year in 1907 and also as a nod to my Glasgow School of art training used Charles Rennie Mackintosh's lettering. Kristina also helped me to translate the text into Swedish as I felt it was important for understanding. I didn’t want to explain in full on the print but to leave it to the audience to work it out. Further research on climate change has revealed that the trees can become weakened by flowering too early and also makes them prone to disease, the crop is reduced. This has an impact for world-wide if the plants don’t know what season it is due to global warming.