Ysella Penwarne
Prussian-blue pressed Cornish botanicals
Ysella Penwarne is a fictional contemporary Cornish artist imagined as having grown up between a sheltered creek garden and the exposed north-coast headlands. Her practice centres on gathering, pressing, drawing, and reimagining coastal wildflowers, especially the tough little plants that root in hedgebanks, chapel walls, and cliff paths. Working in the spirit of cyanotype experimenters, botanical illustrators, and Cornish coastal modernism, she turns humble specimens into quiet emblems of endurance, weather, and place. Each print is composed like a herbarium sheet, but softened by tide-light, hand-tinted washes, and an almost devotional attention to stems, seedheads, and petals.
Ysella Penwarne’s fictional print-world treats Cornish clifftop plants as both scientific specimens and sea-haunted relics, combining the ghostly contact shadows of cyanotype with the tenderness of botanical watercolour. Her images feel like pages rescued from a wind-damp field notebook: precise, fragile, salt-stained, and luminous in deep blueprint blues.
Inspirations
- Cornish coastal wildflower studies
- cyanotype blueprint photography
- Victorian herbarium sheets
- Newlyn and St Ives sensitivity to sea-light
- clifftop hedgerows and granite field walls
- botanical watercolour illustration
Signature features
- pressed-flower silhouettes with translucent overlapping stems
- deep Prussian-blue cyanotype fields fading to misty edges
- delicate hand-tinted petals and leaves over blueprint shadows
- specimen-sheet composition with generous quiet negative space
- tiny graphite labels, tide marks, grid ticks, and collection numbers
- deckled rag-paper texture with salt blooms and sun-washed stains
- Cornish hedgerow plants shown flattened, wind-bent, and slightly imperfect
- white reserve halos around stems, seedheads, and fragile blossoms
17 works in the collection.