Vanishing is an twenty-two panel accordion artbook from 2021 featuring mezzotints of endangered insects by Holly Downing and poetry by Jane Hirshfield. The book was designed by Rhiannon Alpers. The imagery and poems address the extinction of insects as a result of climate change through the narrative lens of hand-made beauty. The book, which includes eleven hand-colored mezzotints, is enclosed in a magnetic, drop spine box hand-bound by Alpers and features a museum-glass "panel" allowing for a peek at the cover illustration: a hand-colored mezzotint of a monarch butterfly. This handbound box measures 7-5/8 x 8 x 1-3/4 inches.
Vanishing is a collaboration between Holly Downing of Sebastopol and Rhiannon Alpers of San Francisco, California. Holly made and hand-colored the mezzotint engravings, while Rhiannon designed, letterpress printed, and bound the edition. Holly was assisted in the editioning by Toni Stirling. It was published in an edition of 20, this being 7 of 20. The mezzotints were printed on Rives BFK and Arjowiggins Kea Kolor Vellim Sombre Grey, and a handmade cotton rag paper created by Rhiannon Alpers was interspersed throughout the book. The enclosure is a drop spine magnet box with a museum glass panel in Dubletta bookcloth.
The insects depicted include: Monarch Butterfly; Red-Winged Grasshopper; Delta Green Ground Beetle; Rusty Patched Bumblebee; Stag Beetle; Bay Checkerspot Butterfly; Hawaiian Green Sphinx Moth; American Burying Beetle, Smith's Blue Butterfly; Southern Damselfly; and Valley Elderberry Longhorn Beetle.
Downing wrote about creating this series: “Getting to know these endangered insects a bit has been somewhat uplifting in this dark time, even though they are at the forefront of the ‘insect apocalypse’.”
Holly Downing, painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born in San Francisco in 1948. She earned her B.A. at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1972. She also studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and earned her MFA from Goddard College where she researched mezzotint technique. She taught art for twenty-three years at the Santa Rosa Junior College and also taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University.
Downing has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greenshields Foundation, Canada; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Graham Foundation, Chicago; and the San Francisco Phelan Foundation. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London.
Her work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford; Scottish National Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Chi-ba Art Museum and Nakasatsunai Art Museum, Japan; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Stanford University Art Museum. Downing’s mezzotints are featured in The Mezzotint, History and Technique by Carol Wax, 1990.
