Artist Demo: Making Botanical Inks with Rose Christian

Rose Christian is a visual artist who works in multiple media and processes, including printmaking, painting, and drawing. She stepped away from a thirty-year career in biomedical education and research to pursue her art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and graduated from Tufts University with an MFA in studio art in 2022. She has taught drawing and printmaking at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and works in her studio in Chelmsford, MA surrounded by woodlands, wetlands, and meadows that provide the materials and inspiration for her artwork.

Artist Statement

As a child growing up in a small town, I was free to explore the neighboring thickets and fields until called home for dinner with my pockets full of wonders: a snakeskin, a toad, a jawbone. As a physician-scientist I explored human tissues with microscopes, x-rays, and sound waves to find those subtle shifts in shape, color, and spatiality that signify healing or disease. This practice of close observation has shaped my visual language as an artist. I use drawings, prints, paintings, and installations to map, explore, and connect with the more-than-human world around me. Animacy, kinship, and symbiosis are themes of my quietly detailed work. The lichen and flora that I encounter on walks are my subjects, collaborators, and teachers. Locally foraged plants contribute their pigments for work that celebrates the life forms growing overlooked in our cracked sidewalks, and not in a glamorized wilderness. I believe the act of careful looking can lead to actual caring; my work gives a reason to look more deeply.