Vegetal trash?
Ever since Genesis decreed ‘thorns and thistles’ as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category. - Richard Mabey, Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants
I work in an allotment that refuses to stay still. It’s become my studio, but it doesn’t behave like one — not an enclosed, private space where everything bends to my control. Seeds arrive without me. Some plants respond to care; others only show up when I stop paying attention. Cultivated and self-seeding plants tangle, interrupt, and overwrite each other. I follow what persists, what spreads, what comes back after I’ve tried to remove it. Making happens slowly, through waiting, watching, and letting go. Materials aren’t chosen; they turn up. They carry traces of who and what was here before me. Timing is set by growth, decay, and weather. The work never really resolves. It builds up, weaving intention and accident together, shaped through negotiation rather than mastery.
Couch grass hi-jacking nutrients from a potato
Opportunistic roots of innocent-looking couch grass
The deep anchoring taproot of a dandelion, bigger than the visible parts of the plant