Flower pressing is an ancient art and science, practiced for centuries as a way to preserve the fleeting beauty of plants and study their forms. Join scientist Emily Meineke and artist Robin Vuchnich for a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn techniques for pressing and mounting flowers, transforming fresh blooms into lasting works you can keep, frame, or share.
In this workshop, you will learn flower-pressing techniques through demonstration and discover how scientists now use the herbariums of naturalist figures such as Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson to track biodiversity and plant responses to changes in ecosystems, such as a warming climate, development, and other human impacts over time. Along with the demo, best practices and resources will be shared. You are encouraged to bring your own pressed flowers to create an artwork; you may alternatively use provided pressed plants instead. Frames, adhesive, and brushes will also be provided.
Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season will be on view in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Gallery through January 3, 2027.
About the presenters
Dr. Emily Meineke is the Assistant Professor of Landscape Entomology, Hellmann Fellow at University of California, Davis. She and her lab members investigate the effects of climate change on plants, plant-eating insects, and their interactions with one another. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics, harnessing advanced pedagogical techniques, notably art-science fusion. From 2016 to 2019, Emily was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where she used herbarium specimens to document how urbanization and climate change have affected plant-insect relationships worldwide over the past 120 years.
New-media artist Robin Vuchnich draws on the herbarium of nineteenth-century philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, now housed at Harvard University, to explore the effects of biodiversity loss through immersive, interactive installations. For In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season, Vuchnich collaborated with scientists tracking species decline in Concord, Massachusetts, to transform Thoreau’s collection of pressed plants into a large-scale visualization of environmental change. The work reveals a startling reality: More than half of the species Thoreau documented around Walden Pond are now declining toward local extinction. Through projected imagery, responsive digital flowers, and soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond, Vuchnich invites viewers to reflect on the fragile relationship between memory, place, and the natural world.
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