Plant-Artist Relationship as Resistance

Plant-Artist Relationship as Resistance

Our research focuses on a senseable formation generated by our plant-artist relationship that gives form to shared agency. The plant-artist relationship is housed in a backyard installation – the Peace Centre and in its transient outposts, broadly converging around the plant and the artist, and the consequent shared agency as players in the unfolding environmental crisis. The collaborators, specifically passionfruit vines and I, apply multidisciplinary creative and relational methods to combine with a wide array of material – ideas, artworks, theories, and conversations, to explore and give form to this shared agency so it can be felt.

We move slowly in acknowledgement that we act on Aboriginal lands, to allow for refection and a sense of accountability in the process of research. The web of relational networks that we are engaged in extends to forest vines in South America, and walnut trees in a Central European orchid, implicating us in planetary concerns.

With shared agency as a central methodological framework, the relationship context of the plant and the artist is informed by an understanding of trauma and is centred on listening and attuning methods. Multidisciplinary art making approaches explore the way a quiet backyard meditation can be given form and agency through practice. The project extends to other people and more-then-humans through a relational engagement with the plant and the artist. Possibilities are expanded through the process of enacting of the links between artist-plant and collective social change.