Tag: plants
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Plant Migrations
With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…
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Bloom
Where to do plants belong? At the bottom of the food chain? At the centre of the world? In a pot? In the garden? Growing wild across moors and mountains, railways and roads… In Ben Cave’s book Bloom, plants are depicted both in states of careful order, neatly aligned in vases or jugs, and out…
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Finite and Alive
It’s rare for me to write about artists whose work I have never seen face to face. It’s hard to respond through a screen to something created to be viewed up close. But that’s not to say it’s not possible. Besides, however near your nose is to the glass, there is always a distance between…
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Binbag, Pavement Tree, Chainlink Fence
Dandelions poking through a chainlink fence; brambles sprouting from an unknown corner; a binbag gashed open, spewing out its contents; scattered leaves; a dead fly. Mimei Thompson paints the everyday and the overlooked. She imbues commonplace subject matter with a sense of strangeness. She works fast, with transclucent oil paint on very smooth, white, non-absorbent…
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There are 355 letters in Genesis 4:9-13
An excerpt from a sequence of 31 perfect anagrams of Genesis 4: 9-13 in which Cain shares an apartment with Father K. in a disputed territory. Genesis 4: 9-13 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And He…
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Wash your mouth out with soap
“Wash your mouth out with soap!” my mother would exclaim. I remember irresistible mud pies as a child, of voluptuously slopped soil, clad upon and between sticky fingers like chocolate in a fascinating entwine of desire and disgust. I desired what disgusted me, and was disgusted at my own desire. Outside the immaculate interior home,…
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Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
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The Beast is not only the Tiger
The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…
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New Wine, Old Pots
When it comes to starting afresh, sometimes it helps to acknowledge a lack of control. That’s the thought that begins to crystallise while visiting the headquarters of De Martino, one of Chile’s most innovative winemakers. We’re standing in a large, bare, warehouse, just south of Santiago, among rows of several hundred clay amphorae. It’s like…
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Phytology
“And though thou seemst a weedling wild – Wild and neglected like to me – Thou still art dear to nature’s child And I will stoop to notice thee For oft like thee, in wild retreat, Arrayed in humble garb like thee, There’s many a seeming weed proves sweet As sweet as garden flowers can…