Statement
I will begin with the core ideas, expanding
outward as a growing tree or radicle* might.
*the
part of a seed that cracks to produce the first root.
Michael Marder’s Walking Among Plants suggests that the spatial and temporal
distances between humans and vegetal matter are what dictate our relationship
to it.[1] My practice works with this concept to blur the line between
‘nature’ and ‘human’ and to emphasise our place within the ecosystem, as is the role of ecological art.[2]
I reference my own relationship with the vegetal throughout my work, not to
center the human experience but to emphasise that ‘nature’ is not separate from
the self. To remove the self is also to claim neutrality, to assert dominance.
By attuning to the pace at and space wherein
plants exist, I have found parallels between my neuroqueer[3]
experience and ‘vegetal time-space’; neither adhere to monochronicity, nor neat
(re)productivity. Borrowing from neuroqueer theory and the queer art of
failure,[4] I chose to ‘subvert (my) conditioning [...] with the aim
of reclaiming full expression’[5] and embraced my obsessive, unfocused, and
multimedia practice. Common western phrases reveal our attitudes to time -
wasting, killing, losing, passing (time) - as those of control. By surrendering
to the slower, symbiotic vegetal, I re-situate my human experience within the
biosphere.
‘Against the
grain’, an
installation of growing rye encased in a pallet container, marked my first
attempt at growing rye behind the department building. With no intention to
harvest the plant for its grain, for it to be ‘useful’, I developed a personal
relationship with it, working out its desires -documented in ‘vegetal time-space’.
The rye died months
later and I realised that I had pushed it to the periphery of my own life. I
persisted in my home this time, and alongside my day-to-day rhythms the rye flourished;
a combination of rye and wheat (against monoculture) grew stronger than rye on
its own.
‘Desir(y)e path’ thus
represents vegetal autonomy by having resisted confined growth.
In my film ‘having/keeping/killing/wasting
time’ I climb inside the planter to imagine being sessile, contained,
and growing with rye.[6] I
decided to provide context through text; “to
disseminate is to scatter seeds” refers to disseminating seeds and stories
as an act of resistance against monoculture. ‘making/marking vegetal time/space’explores the erasure of narratives that situate humanity within the ecosystem
they are a part of, as tales across time typically reinforce dominance.[7]
A looming structure made from pallets, typically disseminating products not
stories, is layered with a year of obsessive diary entries (some addressed to
the rye) and automatic writing. Intended to mark
time and provide a key to understanding the work - the charcoal (burnt tree)
writing has degraded through contact with both the wood grain and my body,
obscuring the possibility of a clear, linear or singular ‘meaning’ in the work.
Initially using pallets out of necessity, I
soon became aware of the vegetal life (and death) inherent to the material
itself. Tree rings and medullary rays* sprawled across pallet cross-sections
and I realised these were vegetal
time-space, the rings a physical manifestation of time. I later encountered a
felled tree and feared losing great chunks of ‘time-space’, so I preserved them
via printing them on paper (pulped tree) as alternate time-maps. The
materials of production and dissemination around us preclude our awareness of
more-than-human life cycles; sapling, tree, snag, become wood, paper, product.
I disrupt this by highlighting the material’s roots and demanding attention for
tree stumps, regardless of their utility - spending several months mapping,
photographing, and ‘being with’ local tree stumps to produce an interactive digital counter-map[8]
of this vegetal periphery.
Nancy Holt and Richard Smithson’s practices
inform my work formally and contextually, having engaged with time-based
environmental research, record-keeping, and working across mediums. My final
‘ecosystem’ of works acts as a map of combined human and vegetal time-space and
considers Smithson’s notions of ‘site’ and ‘non-site’ - works both within and
without the gallery space refer to the wider ‘site’ they come from.[9]
The institutional non-site of the relocated pallet structures echoes the fenced
off waste-site outside, further contrasting against surrounding vegetal life.
Vegetal life resists.
A dead tree stump
supports new life - insects and fungi multiply as it decays; a refugia in the
wasteland of pallets, concrete, and plastic. Situating ‘futile
fertile’ in the gallery renders it useless; a futile attempt to bring life back to the heat-treated pallets.
The circular form references deep, queer, and anti-teleological time, and
painstaking layering of deconstructed pallets is reminiscent of the pace of
plant movement - desperately trying to ‘hurry
up and do nothing’.[10]
[1] Marder, Michael. Walking among Plants. In Tom Jeffreys (ed.), Walking. (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2024),
pp. 206-209.
[2] Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature:
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (New York: Harvard University Press, 2009).
[3] Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer
Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and
Postnormal Possibilities (Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2021).
[4] Halberstam, Jack. The
Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2011).
[5] Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies, p.6.
[6] Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Accessed May 1, 2025.
ProQuest Ebook Central.
[7] LeGuin, Ursula K. Le. The Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction, (New York: St Martin's, 1988).
*These transport key substances from the centre (of the tree) to the
periphery.
[8] Harmon, Katharine A., and Gayle
Clemans. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).
[9] Smithson, Robert. Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings. (California: University of California
Press, 1996).
[10] Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p.
28.