It’s a 54th #womanInSTEM for my last #printerSolstice prompt: variety. Once again I am playing with two concepts of the theme: as design element and scientific term, as in the varieties of #butterfly specimen collected by Victorian lepidopterist, scientific illustrator, traveller and diarist Margaret Fountaine.
#linocut #printmaking #histSTM, #lepidopterist #scientificIllustrator #entomology
In Norwich there’s an unofficial blue historical plaque which reads “Margaret Fountaine 1862-1940 I’m a bloody lepidopterist and I loved love”.
She left 22,000 butterfly specimens and her many diaries to Norwich Castle Museum with instructions that they not be opened till 100 years after they began, which came to 1978, 38 years after her death. They were edited and published as ‘Love among the Butterflies’ and ‘Butterflies and Late Loves.’
Ele Willoughby, PhD