Buttercup – Ranunculus repens: Dust A20(M), 2012

Edward Chell

Screenprint, micro-particulate matter gathered from motorway on Somerset Smooth White, 250 gsm
76 cm x 56 cm.
Edition of 30.

This print is prepared using dust and fine particulate matter collected by hand from the hard shoulder of one of Kent’s major trunk roads. The dust is repeatedly sieved to a fine a grade in order to obtain particles fine enough to screen.

All buttercups are poisonous though are sometimes eaten by pasture animals. According to Richard Mabey, ‘the mineral cobalt, essential for nutrition in ruminants, reaches concentrations in plantains and buttercups 160 times that of grasses’. Their poisonous nature perhaps led some medieval vernacular such as ‘Devils claws or Devil’s coachwheel’.

See Mabey.R Weeds Published by Profile Books, London 2010
pp 71 and 129.

A Beaconsfield FlatBed Edition,  http://beaconsfield.ltd.uk/imprint/artist-editions/

This edition was launched for sale on the evening of 27 July 2012 as part of the event Poetics of the Motorway with Will Alsop, Edward Chell, Jennifer Cooke and David Lawrence.