Roadside Botanicals-

Plants growing along the roadside, or in other areas of disturbance such as construction sites or abandoned agricultural fields, are often thought of as weeds, and are discarded accordingly. These species are fast growing with short life cycles, generally producing vast amounts of seeds. Their beauty, however, is frequently overlooked. Each plant has a particular visual poetry of its own, from root to stem to leaf, from bud to blossom, to death and back to seed.

In this series, the plants are rendered using elements of conventional botanical illustration against a backdrop of landscapes from construction zones on Peavine Mountain, an area in Nevada experiencing rapid development. These plants are subject to removal for road development, land platting, utilities installation, building house forms and other related undertakings that clear or cover the land.

Historically, many women chose to engage scientific illustration as they were denied entry into fine art academies until just a century ago, creating much of the finest such illustration through the centuries we have available. This project seeks to reveal the beauty and create awareness of these often disregarded plants following in the tradition of botanical illustrators such as Maria Sybilla Merian and Anna Atkins, using the contemporary medium of photography in the crafting of the images.

Elizabeth Kenneday, an Emeritá Professor of Art at the California State University in
Long Beach is an artist and author. A recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship at the
University of Iceland, her activities in environmental education through art have led to numerous lectures at international conferences in Europe and North America, and her writings on the subject have appeared in various publications. Her artworks have been exhibited internationally and widely collected, and she has been the recipient of many awards, most recently a Julia Margaret Cameron award in the Cell Phone photography category. Her book Regarding Mono Lake: Novelty and Delight at an Inland Sea, released in 2014, received an Eric Hoffer Finalist Award in Small Press Publishing in the Art category. She currently lives with her husband in Reno, Nevada.