Diane Burke sees beauty in found and forgotten objects that less attuned eyes might easily miss. A collage artist, forager, and collector based in Orient, she makes notecards and artworks that commingle some of nature’s simplest forms with manmade treasures salvaged from the past. Even dandelions are a marvelous thing to Burke, who enthuses over “their graphic shape and color.”
A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Burke worked as a graphic designer for 35 years at Eileen Fisher, where she honed her restrained aesthetic. “[Fisher] was my mentor,” Burke says, “and I had a front-row seat to her design process.” During Burke’s tenure, she recalls being inspired by austere pressed-flower works on paper sold at Takashimaya, the iconic Japanese department store, and becoming fascinated by bookbinding. “I love paper and often attended the annual stationary show at the Javits Center. There, I discovered paper by Fabriano, a family-owned mill in Italy, which I still use today.”
Upon retiring from corporate life, Burke launched Diane B. Handmade, a line of paper goods and framed works featuring pressed flowers and other ephemera both foraged during nature walks on local beaches and accumulated after visits with a passionate personal network of farmers and garden lovers. “I also have a closetful of vintage frames,” she adds, “mostly acquired from private estate sales and my antique collector friends.”
Burke presses freshly picked dandelions onto double layers of parchment and then dries them for 10 days.
Each flower is hand-glued with the help of a fine paintbrush and then positioned on paper with tweezers.
An antique bookbinding press completes the job.
The tools of Burke’s trade, including porcelain trays that she uses to approximate each design’s layout.
Finished pieces range from notecards to artworks in vintage frames.
Burke has enjoyed gathering flora since she was a child. “My mother is from Montana, and my family would take summer trips there,” she recounts. “My step- grandfather gave me a book about pressing wildflowers, and that’s when my love for the craft began.” The flora, she points out, needs to be free of moisture for optimal pressing. “You have to forage when the sun is out and not on an overcast day, or the mist will linger on whatever you might be foraging.”
To begin a piece, she places her bounty face-down in a double layer of parchment, which she then positions between marble slabs and leaves untouched for 10 days so that it becomes as dry as possible. Next, she arranges the flowers on porcelain trays, typically organizing them in the way that she intends to glue them onto paper with a natural adhesive. The process of “building the piece,” she says, “often involves flipping the flowers, or maybe liking the underside better. Getting them to where I want them to be can sometimes take a few days.”
Before applying the flora to paper, she pencil-marks the area she’ll be working on, using precut Bainbridge mat board frames as a guide. With the help of a fine paintbrush, she dabs glue on the flowers and then places them with tweezers within the marks into graphic patterns, whether circular wreaths or simple lines of singular stems. Although she previously used heavy books for the final pressing, she now relies on “Tom,” a circa-1880 bookbinding press named for the illustrator friend she acquired it from.
Final pieces are then hand-delivered to a smattering of shops on the North Fork and Shelter Island. “I choose who I think I want to sell my cards to,” she says, acknowledging the circle of supportive vendors in her tight-knit community. And she has recently found room to expand, having moved into a new farmhouse in Orient with “a scallop shed from 1850” and plenty of space to “hang wildflowers upside down to dry and also to store my collection of vintage frames. The North Fork, with its abundant big skies, beaches, and antiques, is my perfect environment.”
