FERAL OFFICE

Installation of a field laboratory in the grounds of the Les Yeax Du Monde gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia, as part of the exhibition by The Printmakers Left: Catalog, 2021. The fabrication of the Fugitive Botany Lab was made in collaboration with Anne Beck, and with the generous support of Prof. Cassandra Frazer and the UVA Page Barbour FUGITIVE Workshop, and National Science Foundation. The laboratory glassware was kindly gifted by Paul Freedman.

The Unmoored Room – becoming botany

An Unmoored Laboratory tethered at the edge of a forest begins to sense the fugitive, the ruderal, and the ‘invasive’ plants, as pre-cursors of a new nature beyond our own bias. Here the fieldwork is not about classifying or studying ‘exotic plant invasions’ as in a traditional field laboratory, rather it is an attempt to see fugitive as a motive force and idea, as something which might offer us clues about future environments:

intending flight, wandering, migratory, moving from place to place, being of short duration, elusive, likely to change, fade or disappear, fleeing danger – what would this be when applied to the behavior of a field, a garden, a forest, an ecology

The field laboratory becomes a place of concocting essences and extracts: fugitive colour pigments which also speak of spices, poisons and remedies, tales of distant cultures and geographies. Kudzu (Pueraria montana), indigo (Indigofera Tinctoria), Turmeric ( Curcuma longa) and Oak Gall inks were used for making narrative prints on the fabric skin of the pavilion. Fugitive pigments, such as turmeric and indigo created changing colour intensities (this was intensified when the pavilion had to weather a tropical storm, a remnant of the hurricane Ida). Iron gall ink, made with ferrous salts and tannin extracts of wasp gals formed on endemic Valley Oak species of the San Fernado Valley, Los Angeles – was ironically the only permanent pigment.

Botany is intertwined with human history and ancient trade routes. Feral indigo plants which escaped the plantations can still be found in the overgrown ditches of suburban Carolina – they have become a botanical memory – a tangible vestige and witness to slavery. In more recent history Kudzu, a plant introduced from Asia as a garden novelty, became almost mythic and monstrous in the popular imagination of the American South, when it escaped the narrow role of engineered slope stabilization. We might need to change our biases against “non-native” plants, as ruderal and migratory plants become most able to respond to the changing climate and the landscapes we create, the disturbed grounds, extraction sites, the altered soil chemistries.

Colour before chemistry – in  the Indigo Vat:

 

Indigo, Añil, नील

                                  

 

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