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.
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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.
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Verwoert, Jan. Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (Afterall Books / One Work). Afterall Books,
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Appendix