Mary Delany (1700-88) was a witty memoirist of 72 when she in effect invented the paper collage in Britain. Noticing the affinity between a geranium and a scrap of red paper, she took her scissors and cut a petal from it freehand. The exquisite plant that grew from Delany’s work looked so exactly like a watercolour people mistook it for a painting. She had discovered a new way, she wrote to her niece, “of imitating flowers”.
Delany’s collages are startlingly beautiful – nearly transparent apparitions materialising on inky black paper. They have the translucence of both watercolour and actual pressed flowers. Two appear in this exhibition: a flowering raspberry glowing crimson against the blackness and a fragile white lily unfurling its petals, as it seems, by night. They might be emblems for the show itself: discoveries, and rediscoveries, brought out of darkness into light.
