Listening to Plants By Emily Brooke Artemis Feldman-Poyntz BFA, University of Victoria, 2018 A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN 2021 © Emily Brooke Artemis Feldman-Poyntz, 2021 Table of Contents List of Illustrations......................................................................................................................................3 Abstract......................................................................................................................................................4 Land Acknowledgement.............................................................................................................................5 Introduction...............................................................................................................................................6 Section 1: Methodology............................................................................................................................7 Section 2: Descriptions of Works...............................................................................................................8 Section 3: Contextualization....................................................................................................................12 Resistance....................................................................................................................................12 Sensory Alteration.......................................................................................................................15 Land as Context and Process.......................................................................................................17 Narrative......................................................................................................................................20 Listening to Plants........................................................................................................................24 Making-With and New Materiality..............................................................................................28 What Art can do Healing? What Medicine can do Art?..............................................................29 Reflections and the Next Cycle.................................................................................................................30 Works Cited..............................................................................................................................................32 Works Consulted......................................................................................................................................33 Appendix...................................................................................................................................................34 List of Figures Figure 1. Artemis Feldman, Elderberry Forest, 2020. Mixed Media, 12’ x 8’ Figure 2. Artemis Feldman, Elderberry Forest (detail). 2020. Mixed Media. 12’ x 8’ Figure 3. Artemis Feldman, The Candle Apothecary, 2020. Mixed Media. 20’ x 20’ Figure 4. Artemis Feldman, The Candle Apothecary (detail), 2020. Mixed Media. 20’ x 20’ Figure 5. Johanna Hedva, Sick Witch, 2016. Digital file from filmed performance, duration variable. Figure 6. Johann Hedva, Sick Woman Theory, 2016. Digital Print, 800 x 600 pixels, (maskmagazine.com) Figure 7. Bonnie Rose Weaver, Get Radical, Boil Roots, 2020. Digital print, 642 x 642 pixels (longspellherbs.com) Figure 8. Bonnie Rose Weaver, Get Radical, Boil Roots, 2020. Digital print, 642 x 642 pixels (longspellherbs.com) Figure 9. Christi Belcourt, Medicine to Help us, 2007. Book Cover Figure 10. Christi Belcourt, Medicine to Help us, 2007. Digital Print, 700 x 432 pixels (christibelcourt.com) Figure 11. Laura Wee Lay Laq, The Fox Olla, 2018. Ceramics. Dimensions unknown, (lauraweelaylacceramics.com) Figure 12. Laura Wee Lay Laq, Eight Point Pod, 2018. Ceramics. Dimensions unknown, (lauraweelaylacceramics.com) Abstract This research investigates connections between sensory alteration, pleasure, resistance and healing through a land-focused art practice in collaboration with organic materials. Through multisensory installations, murals, sculptures, and texts, my work engages with the audience, recontextualizing notions of healing, embodiment, and land. This art practice is influenced by new materiality, phenomenology, spirituality, and science. The practice is further informed by contemporary artists who work with herbology and healing. With this thesis, I aim to explain why working with plants matters. I investigate ways for art to become medicine. I reflect on how I can ethically engage with the land as a settler. I explore how this work is intended to be viewed. Embodiment and inter-species collaboration inform my practice, and I explain how this research shapes my art today. The objective of this work is to encourage space for healing to become a social or communal practice engaged in a conversation around artmaking. By contributing to a community in this way, I ask viewers to consider what creative healing could mean for them, and how they might imagine this practice themselves. Land Acknowledgement This land is the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. It has become customary to take a moment to acknowledge this, especially when speaking to a group. I am acknowledging a history of a land I identify as a settler on and people I do not share ancestry with. With this in mind, resolving this history may never be a topic on which I can speak with full understanding, but it is my feeling that these words are not enough to reconcile a history which feels unresolvable. I am lucky to know this land and the plants that grow here. I am deeply grateful to have been raised in Canada and to have experienced its beauty. In my gratitude, I do work to both decolonize my mind and actions, as well as undo the damage done specifically to the land itself. I would ask that the reader take time here to reflect on how they might practice making a land acknowledgement into a concrete gesture in support of and solidarity with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people, as well as the land of Turtle Island. Introduction The following thesis is in accompaniment of my art practice. The objective of the text is to give the reader a clear understanding of the methodologies and context that contribute to the work. The text is structured in four parts. The first section introduces my research questions. Here, I explain the general trajectory of my work and suggest overarching themes. The second is dedicated to orienting the reader to my art through descriptions of installations and works. In this section, the works can be read comparatively, such that each work contributes to the other. In the third section, I contextualize my practice within the field of contemporary art. In order to arrange references and discussions topically, the third section is further organized into the subsections: resistance, sensory alteration, land as context and process, narrative, listening to plants, making-with and new materiality, and what art can do healing and what medicine can do art? In this section, I will explore the work of Johanna Hedva, Lygia Clark, Gina Badger, Cease Wyss, Mel Chin, Laura Wee Lay Laq, and Christi Belcourt. I will also discuss the texts “Sick Woman Theory” by Johanna Hedva, Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, “Land as Pedagogy” by Leanne Simpson, The Hidden Life of Trees by Jonathen Wohlleben, The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennet, and Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. I conclude my findings in the fourth section by reflecting on my research. Here I explain how my understanding of the work changes as my practice grows, and how I hope to realize new intentions with future artworks. With these combined strategies, I hope to give the reader a fulsome understanding of both the spirit and context of my work. Section 1: Methodology My art consists of immersive, multisensory installations from sculptural objects and paintings made of herbal medicines, as well as accompanying bodies of text exploring the study and practice of herbalism. These works are installed with illustrations of plant-like figures and handwriting woven throughout to indicate the work’s interconnectivity. My research is phenomenological and sympoetic, driven by an intentional, but not always locatable, negotiation between my senses, consciousness, and bioregion. Here my role as an artist is changed to being one influence among many including plants, bacteria, animals and humans. I have focused my work on the following questions: what medicine can do the work of art ow can art be medicine? How does art heal us? How can making art become a way to resist capitalist institutions and how does that resistance heal us? What can we learn from plants, how can we learn from plants to give and to grow? How do we heal our relationship with the earth and each other? Can we change our relationship with consumption to be sustainable and healing? These questions identify three approaches to research: art as healing, healing as resistance, and plants as teachers. For the remainder of this text, there will be further discussion of these approaches through the reflection of my intentions and research questions individually. . Section 2: Descriptions of Art In this section, to demonstrate an overview of my work, I describe two recent installations that illustrate the evolution of my research through art. The first, Elderberry Forest, is a large-scale mural painted with herbal syrups and accompanying sculptures. The second, The Candle Apothecary, is an installation focused on the sensation and materiality of creative healing. Fig. 1: Artemis Feldman, Elderberry Forest, 2020. Mixed media. Elderberry Forest prioritizes the vividly painted eight by twelve-foot mural. The painting is haphazard, yet illustrative, suggesting loosely drawn bushes, shrubs and trees. In front, on untreated, elongated plinths are seven sculptures, all sixteen-ounce glass bottles containing the paints, which are herbal tinctures and syrups. Fig. 2: Artemis Feldman, Elderberry Forest, 2020. Mixed Media. The painting is the central figure of this work. The sculptures orbit in a loosely symmetrical configuration. Though these works are situated in relation to one another, stylistically, the sculptures appear stark in comparison to the maximalist painting technique. In the mural, there is a variety of paints used. Some of the paints crystalized, while others bled, sometimes pooling on the floor, making gestures texturally distinct. Layers of paints built one atop the other increase the effect. The bottles themselves are less visually dynamic, each containing a brightly coloured liquid, although some of the bottles are messy and none contain the same quantity of fluid. Fig. 3: Artemis Feldman, The Candle Apothecary, 2020. Mixed media. The Candle Apothecary is a multisensory installation of untreated plinths, of varying heights and widths, stacked with lit beeswax candles, bottles, and jars of herbs steeping in liquor, vinegar, or honey. Like Elderberry Forest, The Candle Apothecary includes a wall painting, though smaller and less colourful, which extends itself to cover the plinths. The viewer must walk through the work, always among the art, and surrounded by its clutter. Each candle and jar contain a different blend of herbs. All these herbs are visible, obscured in beeswax or solvent. Here appearance is not as striking, nor as noticeable as smell. The candles make the smell of beeswax, rose petals, and other burning herbs overpowering. Because each candle is made with a distinct blend, different areas smell distinct from one another. As herbs catch fire, the candles crackle. This sound signifies a change in the scent of specific areas of the room, as different herbs catch fire, releasing their scents as they burn. Fig. 4: Artemis Feldman, The Candle Apothecary, 2020. Mixed media. The plinths are displayed in several different, unevenly spaced groupings. Repeated marks made on the plinths interrelate the various groupings to one another. Recipes and information about the herbs used in the installation are written in pencil, covering the plinths. The herbs are listed here by their folk names and their names in Halq'eméylem or Ktunaxa, depending on whether they are local, or from the Kootenays. There is writing on the wall, in pencil, in two separate sections. One section is listing citations, the other is a land acknowledgement. The land acknowledgement and the inclusion of Halq'eméylem and Ktunaxa names were written with the help of Laura Wee Lay Laq, an ethnobotanist, artist, and Indigenous language speaker. Section 3: Contextualization Resistance In her book Caliban and the Witch, historian and theorist Silvia Federici explores the patriarchal restructuring of medicine in the fourteenth century when women healers were vilified and persecuted, while birth control and abortions were criminalized. Women losing the right to care for themselves and each other was a part of the chauvinistic turn culminating in the witch hunts. Federici says that this turn was taken in order to gain control of women’s bodies that they could be used as part of the machinery of the new capitalist regime. My engagement with empowerment and the politics of medicine is informed by Federici, and this historical lens helps me to think through the bigger picture when viewing works of other artists. In, “Sick Woman Theory,” written by artist and author Joanna Hedva for Mask Magazine, Hedva equates healing with resistance, claiming that “caring for ourselves and each other is the most radical act we can take” (maskmagazine.com). The implication from reading “Sick Woman Theory” is that being sick is itself a way to politically resist. Hedva, who often explores sickness and resistance in their practice, discusses the politics that contribute to illness. Here there is an opportunity for illness to contribute to politics: we can stay home, we can disengage from the economy, we can use our stance as bedridden as a means of protest. Hedva goes on to say: The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honour it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care. (maskmagazine.com) Hedva is saying that care should be a constant act and this line of thinking informs my work. My goal is to spark interest in alternative medicines. I make art that is resisting capitalist institutions in this way by educating viewers about medicine they can make without a prescription and without spending money. Hedva’s work draws attention to connections between sickness and otherness and validates the position of sufferers. For example, in their 2016 performance, Sick Witch, Hedva screams satirized repetitions of advice and comments from doctors, pharmacists, and friends made ironic by their comparative impotence in the wake of Hedva’s pain. These words become cries of resistance, as Hedva’s yelling positions their body as one that cannot be subdued. This expression points out the structural imbalance of power between the sick and the healthy. Not only does illness bar the sufferer from many privileges the well enjoy, but also, the sufferer is not granted the right to be the expert of their own pain, rarely getting to contribute to the conversation around chronic illness. Referring to both Sick Witch and Caliban and the Witch, we see the societal impulse to control bodies in their most unpredictable states enacted at the expense of that individual. In this way, unpredictable bodies must give up power and freedom in order to maintain the institutions put in place to care for them. In this paternalistic approach to medicine, to be cared for is also to be controlled, dictated to, and thus contained. Fig. 5: Johanna Hedva, Sick Witch, 2016. This is why self-treatment outside of institutional frameworks is so important. When Hedva screams that we must listen to the sick, I would add that we further need to listen to ourselves and let our bodies guide us in how we live. My intention is always to heal the space I work in. Here, I’m trying to oppose oppressive narratives or environmental forces that may haunt it. Some of what I do is intentional, such as the privileging of Indigenous languages. In other cases, the actions I take are intuitive, such as a feeling that painting a messy, effeminate, illustrative, and colourful mural of flowers onto the walls of Emily Carr University might empower or validate artists walking through the halls. This action is a method of encouragement to students to express themselves freely and free from a well-intentioned pedagogy that may sometimes be unaware of its prejudice. Fig. 6: Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory, 2016. In my practice, the empowerment and solidarity I want to express lie in pleasure and learning. Although rage and protest are important aspects of illness, I focus on what lies after the rage and before the cure, encouraging my viewers to learn about plant medicine. This is resistance because I encourage viewers to choose their own perspectives of their bodies as the most expert opinion available. Sensory Alteration When I set up an installation, I am creating a space that is also for healing. I follow the guidance of pleasure to infuse the senses, allowing the viewer to experience creative healing through this. My primary method of working with pleasure in Elderberry Forest is colour, whereas, in The Candle Apothecary, I work with smell. In both cases, the beauty is the medicine. The pleasure of looking at the brightly coloured paints in Elderberry Forest is derived from the bioflavonoids in the plants. The colours are the same chemicals that strengthen a body1. Likewise, the pleasurable scent is the scent of volatile oils, which are the same chemicals that clear the lungs. In both cases, the qualitative components of the work I seek out artistically are one with the components acting medicinally. These interactions between humans, matter, sensory input, and the therapeutic value of art have longstanding precedents in art practices. Lygia Clark, a Brazilian neo-concretist artist, was an innovator in this area in the 1960s, making interactive pieces with healing specifically in mind. For Clark, the importance of the audience engaging with her work was to bring a shift in their perceptions having the artwork happening in real-time, between the viewer and the art. Influenced by psychotherapy, she began experimenting outside of the art world, creating one-on-one interactions between soft sculptures which altered perception and “patients” she worked with. We see how forward-thinking Clark’s work was in her struggle to find a label for it; she is considered to have ‘dropped out of the art world’ to take on a ‘therapeutic practice.’ I agree that there can be therapeutic value in sensory alteration. For me, for the alteration to be therapeutic, it must be rooted in a holistic engagement between body and object such that the viewer is guided to feel the healing happening and understand it. Clark’s practice informs the shift in focus in The Candle Apothecary. The mark making and bright colours I devoted most of my focus to in Elderberry Forest to are demonstrative of primarily considering the look of a space. In The Candle Apothecary, I consider the space holistically, creating a complex series of sculptures to address space in a multisensory way. The continuation of the painting in this work is a symbolic gesture weaving disparate elements together. In The Candle Apothecary, we can also see Clark’s influence where it becomes unclear whether the art is for healing or for art. The departures from Clark’s ideas are that the space is focused on pleasure, where I am not working with neutral or strange scents in order to have an exploratory effect, but familiar and sweet ones to make a space comforting. There is a psychosomatic effect of being soothed as one focus in my work. 1 This topic is covered often in my schooling at The Commonwealth Centre for Holistic Herbalism, where I am currently completing a year-long program on community herbalism. An article written by one of the founders, Ryn Midura, titled “Practical Phytochemistry,” speaks more at length to this topic and can be found online at: https://commonwealthherbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/CCHH-practical-phytochemistry.pdf Land as Context and Process In the article “Land as Pedagogy” for Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, author and musician Leanne Simpson describes a land-focused way of learning through a Nishnaabe story. She summarizes the meaning of the story from her perspective, and how this way of meaning-making and learning is important and needed. Simpson writes: Kwezens learned a tremendous amount over a two-day period – self-led, driven by both her own curiosity and her own personal desire to learn. She learned to trust herself, her family and her community. She learned the sheer joy of discovery. She learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple. She learned both from the land and with the land. She learned what it felt like to be recognized, seen and appreciated by her community. She comes to know maple sugar with the support of her family and Elders. She comes to know maple sugar in the context of love. (pp. 7) The story Simpson tells is foundational to my practice as it tells of a girl learning from the land and engaging with plants with reciprocity and gratitude: To me, this is what coming into wisdom within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology looks like – it takes place in the context of family, community and relations. It lacks overt coercion and authority, values so normalized within mainstream western pedagogy that they are rarely ever critiqued. The land, aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole-body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, inter-dependent and self-regulating community minded individuals. It creates communities of individuals with the capacity to uphold and move forward our political traditions and systems of governance. (pp. 7) When Simpson describes land as both “context and process” and coming to know as “the pursuit of whole-body intelligence,” she is describing a way of learning that is holistic, embedded in the land, embedded in the community, and embedded in a life. For my own work, coming to know must also be so embedded. I work with land by walking it, learning in it, and eventually, engaging with it respectfully and sustainably by tending to it and incorporating carefully chosen wildcrafted herbs into my practice. I work with narrative by making art a personal story about things I love and things I have lived through; I work with community when I share knowledge and information, and when I do one-onone works with people, talking to them about creativity, art, and health. Mel Chin is an artist creating botanical, land-focused works. Revival Field is Chin’s forwardthinking piece where art is doing science, working with land and plants. Chin planted datura and tested the soil at various times to see if the mineral composition changed. He found that over time the datura purified the soil. The most impressive aspect of Chin's work to me is his assertion that plants, creativity, and intuitive processes can be trusted to do scientific work, asserting that land can be both context and process in art and science. Chin does this by melding a creative and data-driven approach in Revival Field, where the plants themselves are doing both the creative work as well as having the utilitarian application of cleansing the soil, while the humans involved in the process are carefully observing work done with lab testing. Because Chin has established this trust as valid, it opens up space for artists such as myself to work with land as context and process, trusting land and plants to be active in the work directly. Chin is demonstrating that plants can do work to remediate the land when he shows how datura can purify the soil. In my own work, I am trusting plants to do this same sort of rehabilitation but within the context of the body. Chin is thinking of plants as doing science, and I am thinking of plants as doing medicine. It is my hope that the land here is brought into the gallery and body through plants as intermediary actors. When I am bringing smell and fire into The Candle Apothecary, as well as herbs steeping in solvent, I am trying to work in a way that makes herbalism more real for my audience. I chose to make an indoor installation instead of working outside because I wanted to really push the beauty of making medicine and working with plants as a process. Though walking the land and learning about plants is an important part of rehabilitating bodies to the earth, the intensely pleasurable experience of making and working with medicine is so moving to me, I feel a strong pull to communicate it. Through the use of text in accompaniment to herbal medicines, I can further contextualize this process by relating it back to the land. Narrative In “Land as Pedagogy” Simpson argues for an Indigenous understanding of theory: Most importantly, ‘theory’ isn’t just for academics; it’s for everyone. And so, the story of maple sugar gets told to (some of) our kids almost from birth. ‘Theory’ within this context is generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives. Younger citizens might first understand just the literal meaning. As they grow, they can put together the conceptual meaning, and with more experience with our knowledge system, the metaphorical meaning. (pp. 7-8) And later, Simpson relates theory to narrative: Stories direct, inspire and affirm ancient code of ethics. If you do not know what it means to be intelligent within Nishnaabeg realities, then you can’t see the epistemology, the pedagogy, the conceptual meaning, or the metaphor. You can’t see how this story has references to other parts of our oral tradition, or how this story is fundamentally, like all of our stories, communicating different interpretations and realizations of a Nishnaabeg worldview. (pp. 8) When I am writing recipes on the walls, I am teaching a theory. There is a lot of freedom here to recontextualize expertise within these texts. Besides quoting eclectic experts, I am also asking the viewers to become experts of their own bodies and gardens, to foster loving relationships with plants, and to find ways to redefine healing in their lives. Fig. 10: Christi Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us, 2007 Working with text, I have two artistic references in mind. The first is Gina Badger’s book, Get Radical, Boil Roots, and the second is Christi Belcourt’s Medicines to Help Us. Christi Belcourt is a Metis artist and author. She makes large-scale, detailed paintings of plants and animals inspired by Metis beadwork. She includes narrative to her paintings such that each painting has a story. Because of Belcourt’s focus on nature, on narrative, and the way she approaches visual work, my work, with its focus on illustration, murals, and herbalism-influenced botanical imagery, can be seen as in conversation with hers. Fig. 11: Christi Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us, 2007 Belcourt’s Medicines to Help Us is an instructive manual on traditional Métis herbology. Included with the book is a series of prints of Belcourt’s illustrations. Belcourt’s attention to detail makes this work memorable, and her investment in the work is infectious. In an herbalist’s terms, Medicines to Help Us is a materia medica: a book of herbs with information about their medical applications, and other information helpful to a reader interested in working with plants for healing. Belcourt makes this work even more striking by including the illustration posters, as well as information on how to work with plants spiritually. Fig. 12: Gina Badger, Get Radical, Boil Roots, 2020 In contrast to Belcourt’s general overview, Get Radical, Boil Roots was made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is also illustrated, although Badger hired Bonnie Rose Weaver for this. In this book, Badger overviews a list of herbs t specifically help with coughs or flu. I appreciate how responsive Get Radical, Boil Roots is to the needs of the community. In the case of Medicines to Help Us, a lot of the good of the book is to preserve and share the knowledge of the Métis herbology, whereas in Get Radical, Boil Roots, the information is specifically related to building a protocol that can empower the reader to care for their body. Fig. 13: Gina Badger, Get Radical, Boil Roots, 2020 In my work, I am positioning the viewer as the potential expert of their own health and the land they are on. By positioning the viewer in this way, I am challenging the understood structures in our culture around health. When we engage with a human and non-human community in a way that is sympoeitic, we can contribute to a culture of healing. This resistance doesn’t have to destabilize modern science or medicine. I envision communities invested and engaged in caring for themselves and one another. I am hoping that by using a story or narrative in this work, I can frame education and recipes in a way that may be revisited many times and learned on different levels. Listening to Plants Listening to plants is a whole-body practice. I immerse myself in my senses completely while being mindful of the experiences I’m having. Without searching for a narrative or assigning words to a plant, I try to pick up on what is being communicated. When I respond, I am moving my body in such a way that it is connecting with the plants. We have been having these sorts of communications with plants for the entirety of our evolution together, but we disregard that conversation because we are so acclimatized to language. Fig. 14: Laura Wee Lay Laq, The Fox Olla, 2018 During my many phone conversations with the Vancouver-based sculptor Laura Wee Lay Laq, she has described to me how she makes work by listening to the land. I was surprised by hearing someone describe a practice so like mine and encouraged by it. I also learned from Laura2 about the importance of trusting ourselves in doing this. Listening is something that we can do with the land, but it is something that is difficult to talk about or explain. 2 I refer to Laura Wee Lay Laq by her first name throughout the text because of the close relationship we share. Because of the love and respect I have for her, I feel that I must refer to her as a friend. Fig. 15: Laura Wee Lay Laq, Eight Point Pod, 2018 When Laura makes work, she is also responding to the land with her body. Laura’s sculptures, though, are about capturing the essence, or spirit, of the land she is listening to. I also find myself searching for that essence, my way of grasping that essence is by bringing plant matter into my installations. When I paint, I am working with rhythm and entropy. There is an expressionistic way in which I work, trying to express the essence of the paints and the plants they were made from through mark making. I keep myself in constant motion and allow the stickiness and fluidity of the syrups to come through. Though I loosely illustrate, what I paint is a response to how the paint wants to flow. I am both embracing the essential unknowability of a plant, being unable to understand how its consciousness works, and at the same time going about my relationship with them under the presumption that they are speaking to me. In Elderberry Forest, I listened to the plants I was working with, allowing them to take over the painting through their fluidity. When making syrups, I didn’t control the viscosity or colour, I didn’t measure the time or quantity, I allowed them to boil until they smelled good and simmer until they tasted good. In the same way, I did not plan my painting or try to make a particular configuration, rather letting the syrups do what they wanted. Here, I was listening to the desires of the materials I was working with. A plant speaks through colour, directing me on how to treat it, and how to be a part of its life cycle. This is more than simply the brilliant shades of bioflavonoids. In nature, there is a certain shade of red, you probably would recognize it, that means poison and another shade of red that means food. If a plant is a food colour, it is telling humans and animals how it would like them to engage with its reproductive cycle3. If a plant is poison red, it is telling you that it doesn’t want you to harm its fruit. These messages are clear, assertive, and straightforward. The volatile oils of plants are also a means of communication. In The Hidden Life of Trees, arborist and author Peter Wohlleben describes how trees use scent to communicate with one another. A tree might release a chemical to notify other trees or animals that some predator is in the area (see works consulted). Thinking of smell in this way was another reason I chose to burn herbs in The Candle Apothecary. It was my intention by working with smell to facilitate a more direct conversation between the plant matter and humans in the room. These aromatic herbs, such as eucalyptus and thyme, also use their scent to fight disease. In this way, when I’m highlighting the smell of thyme by burning a candle filled with it, I am inviting my audience to listen to the herb's solution to disease. Though I’m not able to interpret it in words, when I am smelling and touching the plant I am working with, it is speaking through sensation and my body is interpreting it. Because of this, I think about ways to amplify it and highlight the ‘voice’ of the plant to engage the viewer. It is important to bring a piece of myself and a piece of the land to my work. When I do this, there are many voices speaking at once, and this visual cacophony represents the sympoetic experience I invite my audience to join. 3 A Botany of Desire is a very good reference for understanding how plants and humans evolved together. Here Michael Pollan describes how plants benefit from human engagement with their reproductive cycles. Making-With and New Materiality In my own relationship with plants, I feel that they have a certain radiance that speaks to me. I consider this radiance, this force, speaking without language. I am responding to this force as well as the sensation the plant transmits to me sensorily through taste, texture, and smell. In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennet described perfectly the phenomenon I sense: When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. (pp. 5) I would like to elaborate here on the unknowability of matter and clarify that when I am listening, aware that I may never able to understand, it is always the case that I am not even fully aware of who I am listening to. The plant I am working with comes from an ecosystem that I can also never fully know, where it was embedded into a community of countless beings. Animals, plants, bacteria, all generating and maintaining and consuming life together. It may have been the constant, vicious attacks from a virus that produced such an abundance of aroma in the thyme I chose, or it may have been the contributions of earthworms to the soil. It could have been a nearby nitrogen-fixing weed. Whatever the case, there are countless contributions to my work that I cannot know and cannot even guess. This is humbling, and it makes me feel closer to the world and the beings that are in it to acknowledge this in my work and my intentions. Through this collaborative approach to art, I have built a long relationship with the plants I work with. Trusting them, I take this collaboration to do healing. I bring my healing plants to a space and allow for physics and chemistry to do the work for me by lighting candles on fire or letting paints drip down the wall. Beyond my control, the materials guide the experience. I think of this work as ‘makingwith.’ I came across this phrase in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble when she uses it to explain sympoiesis: Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. (pp. 58) Here, Haraway asserts that making is always a joint effort and that the idea of an individual is an illusion, referring to relations between beings, as well as the multiplicities within one seemingly singular being. Acknowledging these multiplicities and relationships guides me in my intentions to collaborate when I make art. In my art, when I am making-with, I am relinquishing part of my role as a designer. The construction and making of my pieces are guided by what I’m hearing a plant say. This means that the work becomes unpredictable to me. I don’t know much about a piece until I am making it. This also means that I am allowing the plants to do the work to seduce the viewer. In my past work, before I began this research, I might rely on my skill at composition or at constructing pieces which are conceptually interesting. What I do now is try to be sensitive to the story a plant wants to tell. If a plant is especially brightly coloured, for instance, I might enhance the colour by a method of extraction and display the extraction in a jar or on the wall. If a plant is strongly scented, I might burn it or boil it in the gallery. When I am making-with, a lot of my work becomes to curate a dispersal system for a story a plant is telling. When I am working with an herb, I am taking part of a plant that grows from the ground, and the ground is full of bacteria, fungus, worms and other animals. The dirt is infusing and nourishing the plant which infuses and nourishes me and the bacteria and critters4 in my body. The same plant that I take with my mouth and give to myself and my bacteria, I work with on the walls, listening to it and painting with it. People pass my work and breath it in, the volatile oils that grew from the nourishment of the earth enter their respiratory systems and interact with the community of bodies that comprise a human. I work with these same plants with groups. Mycelium and bacteria and earthworms interact with roots and seeds that immerse themselves into the bodies of my friends and families. To acknowledge this ecosystem, and my presence in it makes me more aware of the art that I’m making. It also makes me a more ethical artist. Though the research I do is often driven by readings such as those listed in this text, by learning about plants from books and herbalists, and by discussing art with my colleagues, the answers to my research questions themselves are found by listening to plants and responding creatively, in collaboration with them. 4 The term “critters” is used frequently in Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble to refer to life forms large and small, frequently for bacteria or microorganisms. What Art can do Healing? What Medicine can do Art? Here I consider self-healing, healing the institutional space, empowering viewers to heal, healing through the senses, and healing our relationship with the earth. Art is well-situated to heal because of its focus on sensation, the enormous variety of possibilities within the field, and the ethical and philosophical trajectory the study of art has taken to become what it is today. To rehabilitate our bodies within our culture, our medicine must be holistic, and in fact, our medicine must come from within our culture, infusing us with rehabilitative spaces and perspectives. By combining pleasure with politics, artists create rehabilitative spaces. This collaboration between myself and plants is where I deviate from artists my work may be in conversation with. For my practice, I believe it is important that an audience learns about plant medicine in the gallery through the lens of pleasurable sensation. I am taking this consideration with me as well as I move forward. This is why I stress the importance of poetry and going beyond the transmission of information. I believe that I can bring the senses into my work by writing in a way that is following pleasure. Reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire changed the way I thought about plants. I did not think of plants as beings that might desire things from me before I read it. One of my takeaways from the book was the evidence to the contrary. Plants, it would seem, desire my protection and care, and they are giving, pleasing, and seductive to me in return. My understanding of a flower as beautiful is part of its strategy to court me, drawing me into its reproductive cycle as my caress of its blossoms’ spreads pollen from one plant to the other. Being pleased by a plant is part of its communication with me. In this way, pleasure is part of a plant’s voice. There is a great deal of difficulty talking about pleasure and beauty in reference to an art practice. We can’t all agree on what is pleasing, on what is beautiful. The unquantifiable nature of pleasure demands that we talk about it, despite the habit in art institutions to ignore its presence. I deal with this problem in my practice by thinking about pleasure and beauty as a process. I can think of my engagement with pleasure and plants as a seduction rather than an attribute. Maybe we can agree that whether the scent of a rose is or is not beautiful, it is an attribute of a rose trying to seduce us. When I work with botanical colours, scents, flavours, that are beautiful, I am engaging with the plant in its seduction. When I display these colourful or scented objects and works in the gallery, there is an explicit invitation for my audience to also engage with that seduction and if they find my work beautiful, they have. Whether or not the invitation to be sensorily seduced is a beautiful one, there is the undeniable fact that the invitation is there. In this way, it is not only land that is context and process in my art, but also pleasure. When listening to and being guided by the plants I work with, I am letting these plants seduce my audience rather than designing or composing a work on my own. I am choosing the acknowledgement of a sympoeitic work intentionally, letting it guide the direction of making. Experiencing this collaboration has taught me about the importance of pleasure in healing. I have found that in Elderberry Forest, in The Candle Apothecary, and in the herbs that I eat, breath, and bathe in is a medicine that is gentle, comforting, and pleasing that can change the way my body exists in a space. There is a psychosomatic effect I experience when being guided by pleasure that heals part of how I exist in and with my body. I have also learned that by relinquishing myself to this pleasure and putting faith in the plants I work with, I become more aware of my role in this collaboration, and humbled by this, grateful for it, I am more considerate of other beings I meet and more sensitive to sustainability. Reflections and the Next Cycle As I come to conclude this phase of my research, I find what I expected to be achievements unfolding as new projects to explore. At this point, I have written and presented my thesis, as well as the newest work, the text entitled The Outdoor Archetypes. This iteration of The Outdoor Archetypes exists right now as an eBook, showing at Emily Carr’s online graduate exhibition, Interruptions. The text includes a materia medica, intimate prose, and botanical illustrations. The intention of this work was to engage with the same sort of subject matter as is written in this text, such as healing, art, land, and resistance from through a poetic voice and directed at a wider audience. I have included a copy of this work in the appendix of this document. The discussion at the defense inspired me to think more deeply about opportunities for this and future texts to grow. We talked about poetry being utilized to access the somatic through discourse, pleasure and its relationship to activism, the relation of rituals and cycles to my work, the importance of communities and matriarchy to my work, and dedication to reciprocity in relation to the land and Indigenous knowledge keepers. I am immensely grateful for possibilities for evolution the discussion presented, for the way they have influenced my plans moving forward. Inspired by talking over reciprocity and decolonial perspectives, I am revisiting and developing the way the text handles Indigenous knowledge, possibly by using a similar technique to that which I used in The Candle Apothecary. By making an ethnobotanical perspective more central to the text, I believe I will make the work stronger and more true to itself. I am researching the origins of the plants in the book more thoroughly and reach out to Indigenous ethnobotanists in other localities. It is important that as a settler-identified author, I am aware of a decolonial perspective and collaborating with Indigenous knowledge keepers in ways that are respectful. I am hoping that by making these connections, I can not only represent a decolonial perspective, but also make new friends and begin to grow into a community. I am also planning and constructing a second book, Through Trauma/The Body. The intention with this new work is to take a very close look at somatic healing through ritual and how that healing can help with mental health issues. I also intend to explore pleasure and ritual more as unique topics. I have a loose understanding that I want to write a cookbook and I want it to be an intimate experience for the reader, making them feel the author’s experience and empathy. At the same time, I am also evaluating my past construction of narrative. As I prefer to move freely from one style to another, this is also a time to dive into explorations in poetry. This book is focused on making a body feel comforted, safe, and nurtured, so the recipes are more closely related to pleasure and somatic ritual. I am rereading Adrienne Maree Brown’s book, Pleasure Activism right now for inspiration as well as looking at Tania Willard’s Affirmations for Wildflowers: an ethnobotany of desire, looking at the way these authors' embrace of the joyful is resilient, courageous, activism. Finally, I am looking at illustration in my work more carefully. I am thinking about the didactic potential of illustration as a recipe or instruction. It was put to me at the defense that The Outdoor Archetypes is in a way, a manual, and this really interests me. If my work is on the one hand, a manual, and on the other, a poem, I am very interested in the tension between the two, and how one supports the other. I would like, for ongoing work, my illustrations to be an integral part of the manual as well as evocative and supportive of the poetry. To inform this research, I am looking at artists like Barbara Dziadosz. Vanja Vukelic, as well as works such as illustrated manuals that are topically relative to my work, such as The Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen. I will be working on these two projects at once, and documenting my research on ethnobotany with narrative, possibly on a website as a way to demonstrate my learning and experience. I believe that by working on both projects together, I can use the momentum from one to inform the other. For the foreseeable future, I will not be doing installations or in-person group work, but this is in response to the restrictions of the pandemic. As restrictions lift, I will be immediately inviting people into my house to hold workshops on sensation, herbalism, and art, exploring activism through togetherness. Works Cited Belcourt, Christi. Medicines to Help Us. The Gabrielle Dumont Institute, pp. xii, 2007 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, pp. 5-20 2010. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, pp. 173-4, 2004. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, pp.58-98, 2016. Hedva, Johanna. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine, The Not Again Issue, Jan 19, 2016, http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. Random House, 2001. Simpson, Leanne. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society: Vol. 3, No. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25 Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. David Suzuki Institute: Greystone Books Ltd, pp. 6-14, 2016. Works Consulted Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. The MIT Press, 2000. Badger, Gina. “Swallow.” Gina Badger-art+research, Wordpress, 01/06/2013, https://ginabadger.ca/?p=872 Borges, Jorge Luis, and Andrew Hurley. Collected Fictions. Penguin Books, 1999. Calle, Sophie. Sophie Calle: The Address Book. Siglio, 2012. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013. Goldie, Peter, and Elisabeth Schellekens. Philosophy And Conceptual Art. Illustrated, Oxford University Press, 2009. Herbert, Martin. Tell Them I Said No. Sternberg Press, 2016. Kraus, Chris. Where Art Belongs. Semiotext(e), 2011. Krauss, Rosalind. Under Blue Cup, The MIT Press, 2011. Lehrer-Graiwer, Sarah. Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece. Afterall Books, 2014. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. University of California Press, 1997. Raunig, Gerald, et al. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique. MayFlyBooks/Ephemera, 2009. Smith, Terry, and Robert Bailey. One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism. Duke University Press Books, 2017. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Random House, 1990. Verwoert, Jan. Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (Afterall Books / One Work). Afterall Books, 2006. Appendix