My latest work in progress is a figure of Jeanne Baret, who was a French
lady born in 1740. She was born into a very poor family of farming
labourers, but in her lifetime she traveled the world, and became the
first lady on record to circumnavigate the globe by disguising herself
as a man on board a french naval ship. On board ship she was officially
the assistant of the scientist and aristocrat Philibert de Commerson,
who's role was to collect animals, flora and fauna which could adapt to
French colonies. Baret was discovered as a woman during the voyage,
although the stories of the discovery and its consequences vary greatly.
The images are of my piece unfired just after I finished modelling it in the studio toady. It's always tricky illustrating characters from history when there are no surviving portraits or photographs to work from. In some ways it makes things easier as I don't have to get the face to be an accurate representation. In other ways it is more difficult- having to make every decision about hair, dimensions, expression, attractiveness. As she has a remarkable and rare story that involves gender appearance/disguise I wanted my Jeanne Baret to be celebrated as and look like a woman. At the same time I wanted to illustrate how she may have been able to pass as a man on board ship. I wanted her to look intelligent and attractive without falling into cliches of what that might look like. I probably didn't achieve all these things, but that's what I had in mind.
(The information that follows below comes from an article by Glynis Ridley who has written a book about Jeanne Baret: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/07/the-woman-who-disguised-herself-as-a-man-and-became-the-first-woman-to-circumnavigate-the-globe/)
'Whatever the case, Baret and Commerson did not continue on with the
Etoile
after the masquerade was discovered. They disembarked at Mauritius,
much to the relief of Bougainville who did not want to deal with having a
woman illegally aboard his naval ship. The pair later travelled to
Madagascar to document plants there, discovering a plant named after
Baret—the
Baretia bonafidia. Unfortunately, the plant had already
been discovered and named by the time Commerson’s sample made it back
to Paris. Only one plant from the expedition honours Baret—the
Solanum baretiae—while over seventy species honour Commerson.
Commerson ended up dying on Mauritius, leaving Baret with a lot of
preserved plants and records and little means of returning home to
France. She found work on the island and married a French officer named
Jean Dubernat. Then, around 1775, Jeanne Baret returned to France with
her husband and plant specimens in tow. The plants were turned over to
the government, and Baret was later granted a pension for her service on
the expedition. Bougainville reportedly said her behaviour was
exemplary aboard the ship—she was modest and hard-working. The pension
honoured her great courage on the expedition, despite the fact that she
had disguised herself as a man.'
My show is called Ocean and Aviary. I designed a large window vinyl sticker for the front window of the gallery, which I'm sticking up myself, for the first time ever so I hope there's not too much of knack to it!
'Encounters', my new exhibition of figurines opens tonight at Corvi-Mora Gallery in Kennington. Each piece in the exhibition is focused on a moment of discovery or interaction between humans and the natural world. Some of the interactions are historical, and based on accounts of the encounter taken from the time, some are first encounters, some are impossible encounters, and all are imagined and interpreted by me. I have written about two of the pieces; 'Hooke' and 'Jeanne Baret' in earlier blog posts.
The show is up until the 25th of April 2015, for details and location click here: http://www.corvi-mora.com/location/
I have been working on a figurine of Robert Hooke, who was a natural philosopher, architect and polymath. He was born in 1635, and wrote Micrographia, which has some beautiful illustrations of things Hooke observed through his microscope. Published in September 1665, it was the first scientific best-seller, inspiring a wide public interest in the new science of microscopy. I visited Winchester College today and got to see this book first hand.
In my figurine I have illustrated Hooke examining a flea through his
microscope, which was inspired by one of the beautiful printed plates I
saw today. The prints are on a surprisingly large scale. 
After finishing the stencil, I was clearing up and ended up playing around with the off cuts, which I feel have loads of potential...not quite sure how yet, but I can't bring myself to throw them out! I concentrate so much on the positive stencil image while I'm creating it that I forget about the negative by-product images until it's time to sweep them up....
I've created a new map print, this time of an historic area in Winchester called Hyde. It's a theme I've created ceramic pieces for in the past, for the Hyde 900 exhibition at Winchester Cathedral. This time it's a screen print. Then I created an alphabet of Winchester, which I'll be printing at London Print Studio in a couple of weeks. The Hyde print is now in my online shop- bysaw.bigcartel.com
