Over the course of the spring, summer and fall months of 2022, a collection of hand spun, woven, and plant-dyed textile swatches were created in the interest of recording the relationship between locally grown/raised fibres and dye plants.
The plant fibres and dyes used in the project were grown on the traditional, contemporary, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations (Vancouver), in urban garden sites stewarded by the EartHand Gleaners Society. The sheep wool was raised on the traditional, contemporary, and unceded territory of the Katzie Nation (Barnston Island) by Susan and John Russell.
The fibres used in the project were processed and hand spun by EartHand community members, Sharon Kallis, and Anna Heywood-Jones. The spun fibres were mordanted, then handwoven into swatch form and dyed with plants grown in EartHand’s gardens (Means of Production & Trillium North Park).
The dyed swatches are complex chemical records, as they mark the interactions between fibres, dyes, mordants, place and time. They also chronicle a network of interconnections, of the human and more-than-human, articulated through colour and cloth. The physical swatches are part of EartHand’s local fibre library and are intended to be used as a learning and teaching tool.
On the following pages each plant is identified using a common English name and a taxonomical designation—however, these plants are, and have been, known by many other names across time and place, each of which articulate a unique relationship to and understanding of the plant.
Note: some of the documented swatches are smaller in scale as they came from the test warp, a design which was later adapted.
The Marigold | Marking | Matrescence project began during the summer after my first child was born. This period of matrescence was marked by a profound upheaval of selfhood—it was a time of transition, a moment between before and after. In the intense bodily experience of early motherhood, I have never felt more mammalian.
That summer, my son and I were invited to be artists-in-residence at a garden site stewarded by Living Systems Network . I didn’t know what, if anything, would come from this time. Art making felt impossible as all my generative energy was being poured into sustaining my son’s growing life. It was the second pandemic summer, another moment between.
The residency was a weekly practice of journeying to the garden. Once there, marigolds became our keystone plant connection, chosen for their profusion and dye-bearing qualities. Pungent layers of yellow, orange, and red petals—blossoms of sunlight. A few modest plants grew hundreds of flowers that summer. It felt as though they were gifting us with their abundance. Filling my cup in a time of drought.
Each week we gathered the blooms that were at the end of their flowering period, later drying and separating them for seed and dye. At the season’s close, a small mountain of petals and seeds had accumulated. Some of these seeds have now been sown in the earth, and the descendants of last year’s plants will grow in the garden this year.
Marigold | Marking | Matrescence is comprised of 113 pieces of paper, relating to the approximate number of days the marigolds bloomed last summer. The work marks a shared period in our respective life cycles—as plant and human, we were simultaneously creating the potential for future iterations of our kind(s) of existence.
The making of the work took place over several months, as everything I create is now affected by the potentials and limitations of parenthood. Paper was layered with dried petals and steeped in water, laying together for hours, days and sometimes weeks in a state of becoming. Each piece of paper now holds a trace of the flowers that bloomed so brilliantly that summer. To me, this work is an expression of gratitude for the presence and generosity of the marigolds—an acknowledgement of these extraordinary plants that stand between seasons, between worlds, between before(s) and after(s).
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Notes:
Matrescence is a term referring to the process of becoming a mother coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael.
Living Systems Network collaboratively stewards a garden site on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations in the neighborhood colonially known as Mount Pleasant, Vancouver.
I use the English vernacular term marigold, as this is the name that I have known these plants by throughout my life—however, there are numerous other names that they hold. The cultural and ecological significance of marigolds is rich and complex with origins in North, Central and South America. They are known as sacred plants in many parts of the world, with longstanding and important human connections—I cannot give voice to the many ways in which marigolds are, and have been, held in cultural relationship. Due to European colonization, the cultivation and human use of marigolds now stretches across the globe (often severed from their indigenous ecological and cultural connections), hence their presence in this garden site.
The piece is shown in the context of the Plant Kingdom exhibition at Dalhousie Art Gallery (2022). Cecil Day’s work is also pictured in the first image.
Photo credit: Steve Farmer
The Fathom works were made in 2018, in collaboration with the waters colonially known as False Creek, on the traditional, contemporary and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. As a white settler and newcomer to so called Vancouver, my presence in this place is as an interloper. Daily I walk the water’s edge and am continually learning and am humbled by the breadth of human and more-than-human history held in this place.
The term Fathom refers both to a 6’ unit of measurement, stemming from the approximate handspan of a full-grown man, and to the comprehension or understanding of something. Traditionally fathoms, as a system of measure, were used to determine the depth of water. In the earth, bodies are generally buried one fathom deep, while a weighted burial at sea requires a minimum of six fathoms of water, hence the origin of the term “deep six”—both referring to the disposal of something and to the point of no return. The ocean is the point where the temporal and the infinite collide, speaking of the endlessly cyclical and metamorphic nature of life and death. This work holds within it a multifaceted loss, as it was constructed during a time of great personal flux, of redefinition, of state change.
I began the work by weaving fathoms measured in relation to my own handspan, as a feminist gesture and as a method of bodily comprehension. Each fathom and fathom fragment was then placed in the ocean and subsequently saturated with the biome present. Porous by nature, built to wick and retain moisture, fibres are conduits of water. Through the work, my desire was to facilitate and record interactions between textile and sea, an encounter by proxy. Textiles have the uncanny ability to take on the form of that which they cover, contain, or are immersed within—they are literal material memory. Therefore, each fathom acts as a kind of record, holding the absorbed memory of the energetic force of the ocean.
Installation view (Gallery Jones) includes: six fathoms handwoven with silk and linen, three framed fathom fragments (18”x24”ea.) and the video shown on an iPad.
Photo credit: Ben Portz
My interest in researching the intersection between plants, place and people has carried through into collaborations with the EartHand Gleaners Society in Vancouver. The EartHand Gleaners Society is an incredible non-profit organization dedicated to using a community-engaged operating model in support of ecologically focused art practices and land-based education.
In 2018, I was a co-lead artist on “Walking, Weaving & Wayfinding: The False Creek Fibreshed”, a place-based research project that conceptually and physically linked EartHand’s two garden stewardship sites (Means of Production and Trillium North Park). The project sought to explore the complex social and ecological history of the land that binds these two spaces, as each site rests upon a bank of the former False Creek tidal estuary. The space between the sites is now occupied by light industrial and residential zones, universities and redeveloping areas. The project worked to acknowledge that which has been lost, what is here now and what is soon to change in the neighborhood. My role in the work was to collaborate with Nicola Hodges in leading a series of public walking/research tours that informed the dye & fibre cartographic component of the project.
Another community-engaged project that I worked with EGS on was “Treasuring Strathcona”, a collaborative mapping project that sought to consider and value the Strathcona neighborhood from the perspective of humans, animals, plants and textiles. This project emerged from EGS’s year-long Artists in Community residency (supported by the Vancouver Park Board) at the Strathcona Community Centre. As part of this project, artist Jennifer Brant and I led a series of plant and dye walks in the neighborhood. The walks endeavored to mark moments in time and place seen through the cultivated and spontaneous plant growth we encountered. Additionally, I acted as lead artist in the culmination of the residency (taking over from Rebecca Graham), and facilitated a number of making events and the creation of a community-built textile map which is permanently housed at the Strathcona Community Centre.
The impetus for this body of work emerged from the desire to build a regional vocabulary of colour. A selection of indigenous, naturalized and invasive plants from across Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia, Canada) were harvested and extracted over a twelve-month period in 2015.
Swatch Description:
The swatches were handwoven using cotton, linen, rayon, silk and wool (in both warp and weft). Each fibre is represented using three mordanting variables (ferrous sulphate, potassium aluminum sulphate and no mordant).
Through a process that feels nearly alchemical, each plant is transmuted into a viable source of colour. The dyed swatches become a complex chemical record as every fibre and mordant interacts with the dyestuff in a unique manner, thus creating a colour field of reactions and relations. They are cartographies of time and place.
All dye baths were conducted at 200% W.O.F. (weight of fibre) with a few noted exceptions.
The impetus for this body of work emerged from the desire to build a regional vocabulary of colour. A selection of indigenous, naturalized and invasive plants from across Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia) were harvested and extracted over a twelve-month period in 2015. The process began by identifying candidate dye plants, which I then specifically searched for. Over time, the project grew to involve a more intuitive approach, wherein fieldwork would reveal significant plants within a given area and their dye-bearing potential would be discovered upon extraction in the pot. The act of walking and looking brought with it a highly embodied way of experiencing place, as each harvesting venture was shaped according to my encounters with vegetal life. Over the course of the year, I came to learn that the land itself was a repository of knowledge and that the presence and absence of various plant species told stories of the ecological and social complexities of the area. It was the politics of land seen through a verdant lens, all but invisible to my untrained eye.
The swatches were handwoven using cotton, linen, rayon, silk and wool (in both warp and weft). Each fibre is represented using three mordanting variables (ferrous sulphate, potassium aluminum sulphate and no mordant). The dyed swatches become a complex chemical record as each fibre and mordant interacts with the dyestuff in a unique manner, thus creating a colour field of reactions and relations. Marking harvesting site and season, they are also cartographies of time and place.
The graph-like arrangement of the swatches intends to reference a common depiction of abstract data, as the graph is often used to visually articulate intangible information. Deployed in this context, the organization of the swatches seeks to imply the presence of the invisible aspects of the work. It gestures towards the actions of walking, looking and harvesting as the presence of the site is privileged in this arrangement: the graph is based upon the notion of a timeline or a map, a representation of the unseen.
The presence of the ‘take away’ document attempts to bridge this gap by building connections between swatch, plant, season and place. It endeavors to presence each botanical through multiple representations, using image and word to illustrate elements of its perceivable essence. The document references the familiar field guide, as it is a tool of identification used to unlock the language of the swatch. Once removed from the exhibition it becomes something else altogether, speaking for itself rather than the swatch.
Wall text: In the inert realm of the pressed specimen, the taxonomic object, there is a thing that speaks of another thing that is and was. As the classification process renders the physicality of the plant present, it leaves the complex whole of its being unseen. If the plant is fractured by the system, then the taxonomic word builds a new entity of knowledge with its fragments, making visible only some small element of the original, as the breadth of the plant's self can never be grasped by the limited gesture of the word.
Patterns of growth are a repository of knowledge, as they reflect the contemporary and historical circumstances of place. The presence and absence of plant species speak to the complexities of land, told from a verdant perspective, all but invisible to the untrained eye. Then there are weeds, the feral ones. Freed from cultivation and instrumentalization, they are self-determined, driven to travel the vegetal desire paths. These are the plants that follow the route of human action, revitalizing sites of disturbance and disregard, exercising agency through their very adaptability and proliferation.
Photo credit: Steve Farmer
The bottom two images are of a re-articulated excerpt of Tinctorial Cartographies (2022) as part of the Craft and Science exhibition at the Alberta Craft Council.
Imprints made with gleaned organic matter on used chemex filters with iron and alum, Golden Gate Park: October & November 2018. 9”x10” each.
California redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)
English ivy (Hedera helix)
Linden (Tilia sp.)
Quercus griffithii
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus)
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus)
Pine (Pinus sp.) & Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus)
Eucalyptus bark (Eucalyptus globulus)
Eucalyptus leaves (Eucalyptus globulus)
Dune sand
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus)
Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii)
Black walnut (Juglans nigra) & California redwood (Sequoia sempervirens)
California live oak (Quercus agrifolia)
Mācpalxōchitl (Chiranthodendron)
Torch aloe (Aloe arborescens)
Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus)
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum)
Textile: handwoven with silk, linen, wool & rayon and dyed with indigo (2'x40'). Wall: slide taken in 1969 of my father in the Rocky Mountains (1"x1"), fragment of bedrock found the basement of the Banff Centre (3"x2"), partial cross section of Jack pine (4"x3"), handwoven tape (1"x80" wound). Drawings: charcoal traces on paper (charcoal sourced from a controlled burn site in Banff). 2017.
To view a video of the production of this work visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luheeXDXmXI
Filling spaces of temporary neglect, they follow the path of disturbance, rebuilding that which has been dismantled.
Weeds of subversion. Each speck of dirt scraped away, not a seed left behind. Such small deaths. Significant in their insignificance.
Site referenced: St. Joseph’s Square, Kjipuktuk (Halifax).
During the period between the demolition of St. Joseph’s Church and the excavation of the site (2009–2015), plant life inserted itself actively within the space. The site became host to a variety of early successional, native, naturalized and invasive species, including the escaped babies of ornamental plants and trees. These common ‘spaces of temporary neglect’ speak of our current and historical circumstances of globalization, colonization and migration, as well as of the continual reverberations of capitalism - as vegetal life inevitably follows the path of human action, revitalizing spaces of disturbance and disregard.
The development of a single lot is a banal occurrence in our cities, an everyday thing. And yet, as I watched the excavators dig deep into the ground I was struck by the fact that these actions were revealing geological formations that have not seen light for thousands or perhaps millions of years. Each speck of dirt removed, all vestiges of vegetal life gone. Therefore, this work is in a sense a monument, or memorial, for the insignificant vegetal beings that share our urban spaces. And for the profound yet everyday interventions which humans enact upon the world. As the body of each plant is literally etched into the cloth, a textile impression of its being remains.
Handwoven with wool and silk, and dyed with colour extracted from four plants/lichen (goldenrod, American elm, staghorn sumac and hammered shield lichen). All were harvested from the former St. Joseph's Church site in 2015.
