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In Understorey, artist and writer Anna Chapman Parker records in prose and stunning original line drawings a year spent looking closely at weeds, our most ubiquitous and accessible plants. In gardens, on verges or clustered around municipal lampposts, weeds offer a year-round spectacle of wildlife. The benefits to us of being among greenery are well known, but what exactly are these vaguely familiar shapes that accompany our every step, yet pass beneath our notice? How and when do they emerge, bloom and subside, and what would it mean to notice them?
Meditating too on how they appear in other artists' work, from a bramble framing a sixth-century Byzantine manuscript to a kudzu vine installation in contemporary Berlin, Chapman Parker explores the art of paying attention even to the smallest things.
Anna Chapman Parker is a writer, teacher and artist specialising in drawing. She trained at the University of Edinburgh and Wimbledon College of Art. Recent exhibitions and teaching collaborations include the Edinburgh Festival of Art, the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Trust. Her writing has appeared in Rake's Progress and Happy Hypocrite. She lives in Berwick-on-Tweed. Understorey is her first book.
"A beautiful, quiet, achingly tender book. A year spent with weeds; giving voice to the exquisite and the everyday alike [...] It's a reminder that the circle always turns; the light always comes back"
– Kerri ni Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
"A year of sketching and musing on the unplanted, unplanned, unremarkable greenery that surrounds us all every day. A celebration of disorder and doing nothing – the perfect antidote to the modern belief that something only exists once it's been captured by your phone"
– Ken Thompson, author of Common or Garden
"A delicately written study of the joys and difficulties of paying attention"
– Jessie Greengrass, author of The High House
"Anna Chapman Parker weaves together art history, botany, ecosystems, and the routines of everyday life in this gracefully illuminating account of a year drawing weeds. Through the shifting seasons, Chapman Parker's drawings and prose reveal the extraordinary value of plants that are generally taken for granted, ignored, or obliterated, and the power of stopping to look carefully, pen in hand"
– Alixe Bovey, Dean and Deputy Director at The Courtauld
"What a brilliant idea, to fit into the interstices of days full of work and two children, the very plants that are themselves so good at filling the interstices of our daily lives. The attention that Anna Chapman Parker has given to the ordinary weeds surrounding her, both in drawings and words, gives them a heightened glamour, presence and worth"
– Ruth Pavey, author of A Wood of One's Own
"Anna Chapman Parker approaches the struggle to find creative fulfilment in a world full of distraction with the same generosity she extends to some of our most overlooked and downtrodden urban flora. This book is as clear-eyed as it is beautiful"
– Florence Wilkinson, author of Wild City
"This tranquil, meditative book is all about the quiet pleasure of examining something closely in order to truly appreciate it"
– Daily Mail
"This thoughtful and beautifully written book is a balm to the soul. Structured as a calendar year spent looking at wildflowers in the author's neighbourhood, and sketching them as part of an attempt to slow down and observe more carefully, this book is part illustrated artist's diary, and part meditation on the process of drawing: what it means to look, take time to observe, and to attempt to record what we see on the page. It's hard to overstate how thoughtful and well written this book is, or the impact it had on my too-busy, somewhat frazzled mind. I drank it in and it has changed me forever"
– Vicky MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain
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