Artwork

7 Impressions of an ‘Honesty’ Seed

Frances Rothwell Hughes

The plant known in the UK as ‘Honesty’ produces elegant oval seed-pods.  In this image, the Honesty seed is translated through various visual stages, exploring the relationship between processes of authentication and the aesthetics of ‘trust’. The natural seed becomes a wax impression like a medieval seal, or a printed motif like a fingerprint, or a cyanotype recalling early photography and blueprints, a newsprint, a fragment of computer code.  Our perception of what is trustworthy, authoritative or honest is always contingent on visual and rhetorical frameworks like these, making the exploration of ‘trust and truth’ in the arts and humanities an essential exercise in critiquing the information we receive and how it is packaged.