Coral

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Studio Puck has been working from a collection of antique books in a Florentine atelier on the Lungarno Guicciardini since 1980 - taking plates from those books and bringing them o nto new paper, by hand. This series is the studio's coral. Each piece is a watercolour of a coral specimen - branched, rooted, named - hand-painted in the workshop from an antique zoological plate in the studio's archive: the kind of detailed taxonomic illustration that European natural historians made of the red coral fished from the Mediterranean in the centuries when it was a serious scientific subject and a major Italian trade. The handwritten labels that ran beneath the specimens in those books are kept with the image, with their Latin names in an old hand. The frames are round, in deep black wood. Exclusive to Australia. Show more