"Europeans who voyaged the world in the 18th Century in search of adventure brought back many plant specimens as part of a great urge to discover the world. Captain James Cook (1728 – 1797) and the botanist Joseph Banks (1743 - 1820) sailed on HMS The Endeavour, venturing into the unknown and putting their mark on the world's discoveries. They named many plants after themselves, and through Carl Linnaeus' (1707 – 1778) plant nomenclature we see these and many other Europeans immortalized. Was this a selfish and egotistical urge? It's still a common practice today.

In Swift's Gulliver's Travels we see Gulliver compare Europe with the places he ends up in, often presuming that all things European are better than these Kingdoms. 

I have been inspired to research how plant illustration would have looked and been used in the early 1700s based on the works that were reference material through the 16th century to the 19th century.

I imagine the plants that Gulliver describes in Lilliput, using inspiration from old master artists and engravers Leonhart Fuchs (1501 – 1566) and Sigmund Zwinger (1744 – 1813) to illustrate an Oak tree in proportion to Gulliver from his description of it being about seven feet high. I have included a silhouette of Gulliver in a similar way to which modern illustrations of trees often show a silhouette of a man beside the tree for scale.

Just as the discoverers of the 18th Century named the plants they found after the Genus, the place they found it and themselves, I have named the illustration after Lilliput and Gulliver. Quercus petraea is the genus Sessile Oak, and the variety is named after Gulliver. The illustration is as it might have been seen in a contemporary illustration.

The undercurrent to the work is to show how Europeans presumed to have discovered the world, and their way of claiming ownership and control over nature."

Yanny Petters