Page 38 - IEA/SAALM Wax & Wildflowers Exhibit Catalog

Rhonda Raulston

Lovinia’s Journey

$750

The theme of this exhibition gave me an opportunity to combine my ongoing interests in
genealogy & family history with herbal lore and art. My mother’s family arrived from England
in the 1600s and steadily moved westward, culminating in the birth of my grandfather, who
was born in 1880 in the wilds of the Colorado San Juan Mountain Range midway through the
family’s journey from Illinois to California.

These journeys were full of hardship and danger and the only available medical help came from
the herbal remedies that had been carefully handed down through generations. The plants in
these remedies were often found in fields of wildflowers and from plants found along the journey.

As an homage to my great-grandmother Lovinia and the accumulated knowledge of generations
of women, I imagined what her Herbal Receipts journal would look like - ailments paired with
healing herbs, recipes (or “receipts”, as she would have said), sketches of the plants, and
advice.

I used materials that would have been available to my great-grandmother. The pages of the
journal are made from lightweight paper; the sketches are pen and ink, colored with gouache
paint, and slightly aged as if they were over 100 years old. Each page is encased in protective
beeswax, and the elegant “handwritten” entries are photo transfers embossed into the wax. I
imagined that her journal was hand-made, especially for this purpose, and was carefully passed
down through generations.

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