Lot 30

The Attributed Studies is April Hickox’s current body of work — a photographic reimagining of the history of botanical drawings done by women in the Victorian era. With no access to exotics, these women struggled to create work at a time when women were not allowed to paint on-site due to societal pressures and the belief that they were too frail to travel. In response, many of these women resorted to their own gardens for inspiration or the countryside they knew well. They would even plant and nurture seasonal foliage so they could paint. In their lifetime their work was either overlooked or attributed to their male peers.

Collecting specimen on the Toronto Island, where she lives and works, Hickox’s series honours the history of the Victorian women.

Equally interested in the notion of preserving and cataloguing, in this case the photographic document and how material is interpreted, Hickox develops categories that parallel how specimens are labeled and stored in herbariums and other plant collections. The Toronto Island is a unique landscape, as it is a constructed environment that includes formal gardens, fields, wetlands, and forest all manicured for the park user. These old gardens are part of the landscape making many layers of plant life that include domestic and wild plants as old gardens return every year.