Seed Cultures Archive

Seeds form the basis of the food chain in the dry environment of the Sonoran Desert in the American Southwest. These native seeds and plants have been used for food and medicine for thousands of years. This photography project investigates the connections between seeds, animals, and people in the desert, as well as the impact that these plants have had across the world. Macro-photographs of the seeds and seed pods are taken to highlight their features and foster the connection between people and the plants they see and use on a daily basis. 

Bio: Taylor James is an artist who works in the photographic medium, MFA graduate, and college educator living in Phoenix, Arizona.

1. Redstem Filaree - Erodium cicutarium, Pigment Print, 30x42”, 2018

2. Sacred Thorn-apple - Datura, Pigment Print, 40x60”, 2018

3. Devil’s Claw - Proboscidea parviflora, Pigment Print, 40x60”, 2018

4. White Rhatany – Krameria bicolor, Pigment Print, 24x36”, 2018

www.taylorjamesphotography.com

I've always been fascinated by the powerful energy unleashed by a small sprouted seed, and making art installations with seeds is for me the most engaging way to pass on a concept of the necessity of preservation of biodiversity and the richness of the diversity of cultures. Our bodies and our lives feed on the inseparable diversity of coltures and cultures.

Each of us is like a seed, and my art aims to show the strong connection between the environment and personal action, asking questions on what kind of "seed" we want to be for future generations.

Bio: I work in Italy and abroad as environmental artist making mainly site-specific land art installations as a reinterpretation and re-elaboration of ecological and social issues, thus giving meaning to my actions, as an artist and a citizen.

GERMINATED BOOKS, site-specific living art installation, 2014

Materials: old books to be pulped, seeds of what I ate for a year, hemp twine

Dimensions: variable

Site: historical premises of the University of Padua, Italy

www.marisamerlin.it

The Last Seed photographic series addresses the way scientists, governments and corporations have been banking nature, in an effort to preserve a world constantly facing destruction. The images are constructed from ‘ice like’ fruits and vegetables with their seeds encased in ‘bubbles’. They are then photographed in a tank of water surrounded by coloured silky clouds against a dark backdrop – freezing a moment in time as if they are floating through space. A reminder that all life on earth relies on energy from our nearest star & highlighting how precious and precarious life on earth is.

Bio: Janet Tavener is a Sydney based artist that explores the geopolitics of food production and distribution and its effect on the environment.

1. Connovers Colossal, ChromaLuxe on Aluminium, 91 x 91cm, 2018

2. Sharp Velvet, ChromaLuxe on Aluminium, 91 x 91cm, 2018

3. Preludio, ChromaLuxe on Aluminium, 91 x 91cm, 2018

4. Violette, ChromaLuxe on Aluminium, 91 x 91cm, 2018

www.mayspace.com.au/artists-works/janet-tavener

www.janettavener.com/the-last-seed

www.instagram.com/janet.tavener

www.janettavener.com

Seeds/Church/Trousers is a work which involved an intensive period of peripatetic seed collecting in and around the Village of Fordham in which I live; For eight weeks I collected 'sweepings' from the Church Undercroft after services, carefully sorting stray seeds from the mud, dust and debris fallen from shoes and clothes. The second part of the work was based on an experiment by the botanist Sir Edward Salisbury in the 1930's; I collected the seeds which caught in my trouser turn-ups, on walks; to and from school with children, walking the dog, traversing the farmer's fields, alleyways and woodland/wetlands of my locality. The two sets of seeds were sown at midsummer and I documented the process of their growth. There grew a mix of grasses – agricultural corn and wild sedge grass from the remaining local marsh land as well as a host of wildfowers from Hawksbit to Poppies. The work plays with an archival aesthetic and includes two medium format photographs, two digital photographs and a set of 'instructions'.'

Bio: I am an artist and researcher living in an area of the United Kingdom called the Fens. Much of my work is concerned with walking, journeying and navigation, particularly critiquing post colonial and male travel practices and re-inserting feminist and 'other' narratives.

www.gudrunfilipska.com

www.instagram.com/gudrunfilipska

Wheat Mandala Series is an artist’s response to agricultural data developed by Dr. Jaime Larson and Dr. Andre Laroche from the Lethbridge Research and Development Centre in Canada. Extensive research into wheat throughout history and society manifested into a series of mandalas, each depicting a specific narrative relating to wheat. The layout of graphic imagery is carefully composed in the form of a mandala, a play on the cultural shift from a spiritual to the scientific, as well as to create a sense of stability and calm introspection.

IMAGE 1 / MANMADE FAMINE represents catastrophic human failures that have resulted in mass famines throughout history to present day events, caused by social, economic, and political decisions.

IMAGE 2 / PUCCINIA STRIIFORMIS, shows the many faces of a plant pathogen from the fungi kingdom that causes stripe rust on wheat, from the Roman god of agricultural disease, to scientific models of spores, to microscopic views of rust cells, and RNA data used for genetic modification from the Lethbridge Research Center.

IMAGE 3 / YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER begins with the eruption of Mt.Tambora in 1815 - the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Ash was dispersed around the world causing crop failures. The lack of feed for horses inspired the invention of an early form of a bicycle as a means for human-powered transportation. Vacationing at Lake Geneva that summer, the author Mary Shelley was forced to stay inside due to the inclement weather. That summer she wrote her influential novel Frankenstein.

Bio: Adrien Segal is an artist based in Oakland, CA.

www.adriensegal.com/wheat-mandalas

The work submitted to the Agri-Cultures/Seed.Links project touches on the connection between computer generated prediction models and agricultural efficiency, and how fragile both these artificial- and natural systems are.

The Berlin photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), known for his extensive photographic studies of stems, leaves and seedpods, inspired me to create a modern day variation through computer generated plant structures. By applying a custom source code to a dated computer program— once used for creating optimal planting patterns and harvesting methods, a series of glitches occurred. Continuing to experiment with this input, the deformations grew until it was no longer possible to create a true to nature representation. Disconnecting original intent from abstract form.

Like Blossfeldt, I recorded these variations, primarily motivated by a scientific interest. Starting with cataloging the various glitches, then, again not unlike Blossfeldt, grouping these variations into a typography of digital plant life, focussing on abstractions of form.

Bio: Matthijs Uivel (1982-), MFA, currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Titles: Arbaro 1, Arbaro 2, Arbaro 3

Arbaro 4

Dimensions: 1018 x 1400 px 72 dpi rgb

Year of production: 2019

www.matthijsuivel.com

www.instagram.com/m.uivel

Working with seeds is integral to my work. I pursue a global investigation of our entangled relationship with the living world. I ask, how is it that we have poised ourselves to destroy the prospects for decent existence for much of life? This past year, I’ve been working in Berlin as an artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, collecting seeds at sites of trauma. Weaving notions of our current ecological crisis with Berlin’s history of violence raises the question: Is the demise of social and environmental relationships inextricably linked? This question plays out in performance: Lucy Palustris, my alter-ego, is the complicit hero. A tragic-comedic figure, she is a manifestation of the absurd; her global-call-to action a Sisyphean gesture.

Bio: Patricia Coates (aka Lucy Palustris) is a Canadian-based artist working in performance, video, installation, living materials (indigenous trees grown from seed) who weaves themes of entropy, enthalpy and the absurd to reveal a paradox of the human condition -- our irreconcilable creative and destructive selves.

1. A house besieged. Endurance performance and installation. Watering, checking for mites of 2,000+ indigenous seedlings grown from seed prior to spring planting; installed in my late father's abandoned house. 2016

2. Evacuation seedvault. Performance; immersive seed vault installation: transgenic, invasive and indigenous specimens, Erlenmeyer flasks, lab paraphernalia, Silkscreen: grain sacks with DNA electrophoresis codes, vintage tool boxes, military ammunition boxes. 2016

3. Gathered Nettles by the wall sting and heal. Performance, nettles, rubber gloves, vintage evening gown, remnant of the Berlin Wall. 2018

4. The Green Line 2 channel video installation as part of the Propagation Project installation, ON. Canada 2016

www.facebook.com/lucy.palustris

www.satelliteberlin.org CONTOURING A MIND No. 3, a short documentary on my work with seeds and botanical specimens produced by Satellite Berlin, Berlin, Germany as part of a six month residency in Berlin, 2018.

I have a personal obsession with collecting. For the past fifteen years I have been collecting minerals, antiques, stamps, coins, and fossils. The Cabinets of Curiosities that were the predecessors of today’s museums have been my source material, and the traveler artist and naturalist the archetype of my artistic persona.

My primary mode of creative initiation is sculpture. I work with plants and seeds intervening them with resin. These objects functions as the Vanitas of the Baroque, emphasizing the fragility of life. As well, the work leads metaphorically to the concepts of conservation and future fossils, because the seeds remain dormant with latent life.

1. Livistona Chinensis, Plant, resin, 2018.

2. Acanto, Plant, resin, 2018.

3. Aloe Flower, Plant, resin, 2017.

4. Taxidermy Vegetalia, Plant, resin, 2015.

Bio: Gabriela Acha, Argentinean performer and visual artist, is currently attending the Master in Artscience of the Royal Academy of Art in Nederland.

www.achagabriela.com

www.instagram.com/achagabriela

www.facebook.com/achagabriela/

The seed confronts the very kernel of our human value systems. I became intrigued in the material and immaterial quality of seeds especially following my relatively recent discovery of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, “the safest place on earth”, in 2016. Indeed this discovery has sparked a series of paper and golden seed vaults disguised as golden monochrome paintings that can be planted in face of disaster. Each work has the potential to yield plants of diverse colors and sizes specifically curated to nourish the soil and feed the bees in the area where the work is exhibited.

1. KIKI, 2017, 24k gold leaf, various local, paleo seeds, paper, cardboard, oak wood frame, 80 x 80 x 3 cm

2. Ambrosial Hour, 2018, Installation view of 2 works, Red Gold Leaf and Yellow Gold Leaf, various seeds, paper, cardboard, oak wood frame, 120 x 120 x 3 cm

3. Planting of KIKI, 2018, Documentation of planting and acquisition of gold work KIKI at the ING Brussels public garden

4. Stage 1 of the Planting Phase, Documentation of the first growth from the seeds of gold work KIKI, at ING Brussels public garden

Bio: Life experiences in seven countries, three continents and fifty-five homes has become a resource for my work which confronts and constructs the ways we define ourselves and the world around us within a perpetual present.

www.cadinenavarro.com

www.instagram.com/cadinenavarro/

Utilizing the symbolic language of diagrams and models, Linantha’s seed-like forms connect to the landscape and suggest the scientific process through their modes of visualization. Implying a process of moving from the unfamiliar towards understanding, it is within this active space that the wonders of diversity and resilience in the seed world lie. Their importance in the greater environmental landscape as markers of history, biology, sustenance and life, rest in our capacity to value and protect this knowledge.

Linantha (& detail), Porcelain, gypsum, acrylic and wood, 24" x 24" x 5", 2003

Bio: An Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Denver, Mia Mulvey’s studio process is one of investigating the environment, wonder, material and digital technologies.

MiaMulveyStudio.com

Instagram.com/MiaMulveyStudio

I have become fascinated with the idea of making my own ex-situ seed library and 15 years ago, began incorporating seeds of plants that I loved into my work, knowing that if these trees became extinct I would be able to repopulate our gardens, and others with them. My art has also followed my life interests using plants as a wellspring for inspiration. From sprout to decay, a viewer is visually confronted with the profoundly beautiful, devastating, and inevitable life cycle. My paintings are my attempt to portray, justify, and perhaps find beauty and solace in these brief moments.

1. Safflower - Safflower & encaustic on wood, 14” x14” 2018

2. Butternut - Butternut seed & encaustic on wood. 12”x12” 2012

3. Empress Sperm - Paulownia seed & encaustic on wood. 12”x12” 2012

4. White Ash - Ash seeds & encaustic on wood. 12”x12” 2013

Bio: I came out many years ago as a plant obsessed individual, constantly gardening, and when it gets too dark outside to plant I can then be found in my studio making art with them. I am co-founder of Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens located in the Hudson Valley in NY.

Images from Carrie Haddad Gallery

botanicalart.us

This series of drawings considers seeds in their symbolic form and brings together elements of our shared human histories. They represent ‘an ark for our time’. Part document, part diary, archetypal stories from deep history combine ancestral voices with those of contemporary authors. These pages act as ‘seeds of thoughts’ - touchstones to inspire us as we face increasing social, economic and biophysical challenges. Each page offers a point of reflection. Covering topics from crop diversity to climate change they serve to remind us we are part of a wider dynamic life system.

Ark - ‘From Deep Blue to Troubled Green We Pass’.

Edition: Unique Artist Book, 2019.

Materials: Solander Box, Pen & Ink Drawings over Text from Resurgence Magazine, Waxed Paper, Tissue Paper, Cotton Thread, Honesty Seeds.

Bio: Combining her background in Fine Art, with a curiosity about the natural world, Chris Ruston produces unique Artist Books which facilitate thinking about our place in the world, weaving connections from the past with present.

chrisruston.com

Instagram.com/artistchrisruston/

I am passionate about the environment and nature and particularly captivated by the beauty and intricate aesthetics of seeds. The magical transformation they undergo in their growth to plants a constant joy.  I’m exploring seeds that become products we are familiar with but have often forgotten their origin. I’ve studied seeds that I find visually captivating and surprising in their form and colouration. Most importantly to me I’m presenting the vulnerable conservation status and perilous sustainability of seeds using vintage fabrics to mimic their colours and reflect how once used they could be lost forever.

1. Traveler’s Palm – Ravenala madagascariensis, Vintage fabric, thread, watercolour paper, 17 x 23 inches, 2018.

2. Tobacco – Nicotiana tabacum, Vintage fabric, thread, watercolour paper, 9 x 8 inches, 2018.

3. Square Stem Spikerush – Elocharis quadrangulata, Vintage fabric, thread, watercolour paper, 8 x12 inches, 2018.

4. Peanut – Arachis hypogaea, Vintage fabric, thread, watercolour paper, 9 x 8 inches, 2018.

Bio: Rebecca Bruton is a textile artist based in Somerset, specialising in free motion embroidery and applique to build up vibrant textile artworks. She uses the sewing machine as a tool to mix colours and ‘paint’ with a free-hand style using threads and vintage fabrics.

www.rebeccabruton.co.uk

www.instagram.com/rebeccabruton_/

Seed Cabinet invites the audience to dig deeper in reflecting upon their role in global and local food systems. The work blends live “lecture” with digital re-presentation of oral history, filmic instructional media, cooking shows, experimental ethnography, animation, farmer’s almanacs. The drawers of a repurposed “old school” maple card catalog are filled with seed specimens of regional heirloom fruits and vegetables and images printed on glass slides. Opening the drawers triggers the playing of videos and audio narratives of our community’s lived experience of these foods: their cultivation, preparation, and history onto a video monitor embedded into the top of the card catalog. 

Seed Cabinet, Repurposed maple card catalog, custom electronics, glass slides, seeds, video, 2017-present

Bios: Melissa DeSa is a self-taught farmdener and avid seed saver, who oversees the Southern Heritage Seed Collective and the youth garden initiative at Working Food, a non-profit organization, in Gainesville, FL.

Katerie Gladdys creates installations, interactive, sculpture, video, and relational performances that examines overlooked landscapes, consumption, and agriculture.

Anna Prizzia is the President of Working Food, a non-profit organization, in Gainesville, FL and is the director of the Field and Fork Program and the Campus Food Systems Coordinator at University of Florida.

Katerie: www.layoftheland.net

Melissa and Anna:

www.workingfood.org

www.workingfood.org/southern-heritage-seed-collective/

www.workingfood.org/youth-gardens/

www.facebook.com/workingfoodcenter/

www.instagram.com/workingfoodgnv/

Through my practice, I explore the multi layered narratives embedded in the landscape, culture, and ecology of our interconnected world/s. I have a deep commitment to environmental sustainability and for the past decade much of my practice has been in collaboration with botanic gardens and scientists, pollination scientists and policy makers.

In ‘Cross Pollination’, I work with botanists and farming policy makers to explore the way bio-mimicry works in plant and insect communities. Images are printed directly onto fabric using vegetable dyes and the structures and patterns of seeds and pollen grains are incorporated into multi-sensory designs.

1. Ghost Orchid, Karen Ingham, giclee print and digital textile 100cm x 50cm, 2018.

2. Pollinator Meadowlands (Campion-Silene), Karen Ingham,detail from digital textile 140cm x 200cm, 2018.

3. Hoverfly Bio-mimicry Masquerade Spiral, Karen Ingham, digital textile, 90cm x 160cm, 2018.

Bio: Dr. Karen Ingham is an internationally exhibited interdisciplinary artist and environmentalist.

 www.kareningham.org.uk

As a proponent of the STEAM initiative, an educator, glass artist, and printmaker, my work in the last 5 years has been focused around the importance of the Global Seed Vault and Climate Change. Through the support of the Swedish American Fund Grant, I wrote an interdisciplinary curriculum that was taught locally, nationally, and internationally. We worked with serigraphy and kiln formed glass as primary mediums. The idea was to create any type of seed to put into the seed vault and what would the purpose serve in case of a man made or climate catastrophe? 

Bio: Shandra (Shani) McLane is a glass artist, printmaker, and educator from Bridgewater, NH USA.

www.squamriverstudios.com

www.shanimclane.com

Rather than focusing on agricultural heritage, NESL re-imagines the conventional seedbank for the so-called Anthropocene. Stocked with seeds gathered from vacant lots, street verges, superfund sites and abandoned infrastructure, NESL provides a gene pool of tough, hardy plants adapted to live near humans. Offering services like soil stabilization, moisture retention, heat island reversal, and toxic bio-accumulation, these ideal pioneer plants help heal wounds inflicted by a changing climate. NESL believes reciprocal networks of plants and people can support ecologically just communities. We produce art installations, public workshops, walks, curriculum materials. The collection travels between exhibitions and is accessible by mail.

1. Next Epoch Seed Library: Northern New Jersey Superfund Collection, Pierro Gallery, South Orange, New Jersey, 2018. Takeaway brochure for special collection from superfund sites in northern New Jersey. For an exhibition at Pierro Gallery, we sprouted the seeds as “rapid response soil repair units,” exploring how contaminated soils can support and be repaired by weedy plants.  

2. Seed Microscopy, Commelina Communis (Asiatic Dayflower). Digital image, dimensions variable. Scanning electron microscopy on NESL seeds, in collaboration with the Nature Lab at the Rhode Island School of Design, 2016.

3. Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory. Troy, NY. In partnership with NATURE Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media and Environmental and Site Planning at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 1 x 1 meter test plots, flagging, stakes, signage, digital species inventory on iNaturalist, community participation. 2018. Turf was removed from four plots around Troy, uncovering the seeds of pioneer species in the “soil seedbank”. These seeds may have stayed dormant for years or decades, covered by lawn, but are now allowed to sprout.

4. Time Capsule for Pacific Street Futures Workshop. Two handmade ceramic vessels, 4x4x4”, seeds, public participation; 2017. 1067 Pacific People, Brooklyn, NY, in partnership with the Environmental Performance Agency. Public workshop including: a discussion of long-term seed storage; seed collection from the contaminated EPA lot; filling two ceramic time-capsules with collected seeds, and burying one of the vessels onsite.

Bio: The Next Epoch Seed Library, founded by artists Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco in 2015, champions the weedy plants most likely to survive and thrive in a future dominated by human excess.

nextepochseedlibrary.org

Pleng Arak is an ancient agricultural Khmer music performed during shamanistic ceremonies to call spirits when there is no rain or if the region is struck by a disease. Almost extinguished during the Khmer Rouge period (1976-1979) - when music from past eras was forbidden and most of the musicians killed - Pleng Arak is now facing new risks: the rise of modern medicine as well as lack of interest and belief from the younger generation. There are only a few musicians able to play it and fewer opportunities to perform it. Just like seeds, traditional musics are also vulnerable to various factors and their loss is both irreversible and dramatic: they are artifacts of our cultural diversity that must be preserved.

In August 2018, Sébastien traveled to Cambodia to record one of the last bands of Pleng Arak. The musicians allowed him to photograph them and record the thirty-five songs of their repertoire, provided that they will never be shared nor published. Because it is exclusively performed during sacred rituals, listening to this music outside of its original context - besides being inappropriate - could potentially put the listener at risk. Sébastien deliberately took a step further by making sure that nobody would ever be able to reproduce it. Starting from the recordings’ sonograms - a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in a sound - he translated them into ASCII. The idea was to get as close as possible to a numbered score of a Tro Khmer, one of the instruments used in Pleng Arak. These abstractions were then engraved on tablets made of limestone and sandstone, the most common in Cambodia - earning Khmer people the rank among the finest stone carvers in the world between the 9th and 13th centuries. In this way, Pleng Arak will be preserved and remembered for a long period of time.

The Forgotten Melodies of Pleng Arak, Engraved sand and limestone - 30x40 cm, 2019 ©  Sébastien Robert

Bio: Sébastien Robert (1993) is a French sound artist, photographer, researcher and master student of the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) and the Royal Conservatory (KC) of The Hague.

www.sebastienrobert.nl

www.instagram.com/_sebastien_r_/

Seeds are fundamental units in our relationship with food, agriculture, and the natural environment. On both physical and symbolic levels, seeds collectively carry the history of complex motives and consequences of plant domestication. Seeds have been both silent witnesses and active participants in waves of travels and migrations, growth and decline, individual and societal transformations. Seeds are also records of more personal stories of people or families that cultivated them for generations. Such diversity and richness of the deeply rooted relationships of people and seeds remains mostly silent, physically and figuratively locked inside the coat of each seed.

By traveling the country and connecting with a multitude of people and organizations that contribute to seed advocacy, Furrow project seeks to make those often compelling stories visible, to externalize and memorialize the contributions of growers, breeders and seed-savers through the art of hand-engraving on the actual seed-pods. List of images and details are as follows, dimensions are in millimeters: 

1. Rondout Valley Growers. Hand-engraving on an heirloom baking bean, 15x8x7, 2019.

2. Hudson Valley Seed Company and Seedshed. Hand-engraving on squash seed, 20x12x2, 2019.

3. McDonough's Greenhouse. Hand-engraving on sunflower seed, 12x5x2, 2019.

4. Mountain Dell Farm. Hand-engraving on flint maize, 9x8x6, 2019.

5. Glenwood Green Acres, PA. Hand-engraving on fava bean, 25x15x8, 2019.

6. Three sisters for Akwesasne. Hand-engraving on Mohawk maize, 15x8x3, 2019.

Bio: Sergey Jivetin is a sculptor-miniaturist, born in Uzbekistan, active in the USA since 1992. 

www.seedengraving.com

www.facebook.com/Sergey-Jivetin-1677606955789000/

www.instagram.com/sjivetin/

My work with seeds began ten years ago, when I started collecting specimens in my Los Angeles neighborhood, noticing their diverse forms and learning about their adaptive behaviors. I photographed many of these specimens and wrote about the relationship with their ecologies. This study expanded to the cultural perception of plants and seeds, and their representation in society over time and place. Iraq: Recovering a Garden of Paradise examines the past, present & future of agriculture in the modern-day Fertile Crescent. 

1. Wheat Farmer, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. For much of the region’s history, wheat and barley were primary exports; today, Iraq is one of the world’s largest grain importers. Compromised by contaminated grain, Omar Ali’s harvest is inedible. It will become animal feed, and he will purchase wheat to feed his family. 

2. Bread, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. The disappearance of pastoral villages is becoming emblematic of the long-pastoral region, now struggling to recover food sovereignty and retain a wealth of endemic crops and agricultural legacies. In Kani Sard, a village just two miles from Jarmo (where wheat was domesticated around 8,000 B.C.), women make bread with bags of flour marked “Switzerland.” Subsistence farming is increasingly difficult with dwindling local support and resources. Lack of water has driven more than half of Kani Sard’s population to the city in the past few years.

3. Untitled, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. An installation in Sulaimaniyah, northern Iraq, is an example of the region’s use of botanic subjects to reclaim a history of war and persecution. 

4. Um Ali, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. Iraq’s national seed bank at Abu Ghraib was destroyed in 2003, jeopardizing the region’s botanic diversity. Hoping to mitigate the casualties, a leading scientist buried a cache of seeds in her basement for safekeeping. Eight years later, she still devotes herself to preserving local plants, and attends a field workshop led by Nature Iraq. An effort to recover Kurdistan’s wealth of botanic knowledge, the course includes field identification, mapping red listed plants, and biodiversity conservation.

5. Jarmo, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. Jarmo, a neolithic farming site in Kurdistan’s foothills, is believed to be one of the world’s earliest farming villages. Archaeologists have found evidence of domesticated wheat and seed storage that date from around 8,000 B.C. Providing ancient farmers with security and stability, Jarmo’s proto-seed bank and cultivated wheat indicate that the region’s agriculture allowed for the birth of civilization. Today, whether by genetic modification or by law, farmers cannot save seeds from many crops.

6. Hollyhock, C-type print, 10”x16”, 2012. A wild hollyhock near Jarmo, northern Iraq. Hollyhock are among the flowers found in Shanidar Cave, Iraq, a Neanderthal burial site dated 60-80,000 years ago. Referred to as a “flower burial”, the heads of eight species of medicinal plants included yarrow, ragwort, woody horsetail were buried in one grave alone, suggesting that the man had been a traditional healer.

Bio: Anna Laurent is a flora-focused artist & author whose award-winning work explores the visual representation and cultural interpretation of plants. 

www.annalaurent.com

www.instagram.com/anna__laurent/

twitter.com/annalaurent

The small living time capsule/reliquary I have designed is composed of several layers that relate to the mutually affectual culinary activities of humans and bees. A wooden container engraved with botanical illustrations carries a blown glass vessel. This vessel contains a variety of plant seeds from culinary herbs that are specifically chosen for their desirability to bees for pollination. The seeds are suspended in pure honey; which acts as a preserving agent. In this way, the result of the bees’ labour - honey - is used to preserve the futures of the very plants they used to create it.

Bio: Paul Chartrand engages with environmental issues through the construction of sculptural life support apparatuses populated with living plants.

www.instagram.com/lpaulchartrand

www.paulchartrandart.com

My main field of interest lies in the relationship between contextual practices with different disciplines and how this connection can be a medium to establish new dialogues between ecology, art and society. The projects conceived in my practice propose new narratives to relate us with the environment, exploring new aspects to redefine the boundaries between habitats and community by creating sensitive interventions that leave spaces for new encounters. I am interested on providing experiential approaches by incorporating the notion of landscapes, emphasizing their specific qualities.

The artwork for Agri-Cultures/Seed.Links Exhibition is inspired by and pays homage to La Milpa, a traditional and historical agricultural system from Maya and Mesoamerica civilization that produces maize, beans, squash and chile. A series of works that appeals its symbolic and cultural significance increasing the imaginary of its cycles, stages, interactions, biodiversity and cosmovision through poetic dialogues. The artwork explores diverse substrates and media, such as drawing, photography, literature, the body, and living sculptures.

Bio: Ivan Juarez is a landscape architect and practicing environmental artist, working across a wide variety of mediums and scales. Founder of the research practice x-studio and founder of Sensory Landscapes, a research lab dedicated to expanding our knowledge and senses to the natural and cultural environment.

www.x-studio.tv

Seeding Stories: A Guide to the Interior of a Salt Water Crocodile consists of a comparative seed bank; that of a 133-yr-dead, 4.7m long, taxidermy salt-water crocodile from colonial Singapore’s Raffles Museum. When opened for conservation in 2013, the crocodile was unusually found to be packed with wheat straw. This crocodile is also believed to host the spirit of Panglima Ah Chong, nineteenth century gangster, Taoist mystic, and anti-colonial freedom fighter. A wheat grain, a crocodile and a spirit, all entangled in the legacies of colonial agro-economies and monstrous dreams of progress. How might these speak to the mountain housing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a time of mass extinction and climate change?

Artistic Collaborators for Seeding Stories: A Guide to the Interior of a Salt Water Crocodile

Zachary Chan,  Book designer and performer

Lucy Davis, Project conceptualiser, artist, art writer & educator

Kee Ya Ting, Photographer, cinematographer

Muhammad Faisal Bin Husni, Researcher, writer, performer

Letters to a Grain of Wheat/Crocodile/Spirit

Charli Aron, Bartaku, Yvonne Billimore, Nils Bubandt & Anna Tsing, Shirley Chew, Heman Chong & Renée Staal, Kevin Chua, Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn, Raphael Dagold, Gaynor Kingston Davis, Isabelle Desjeux, Martin Foakes, Harriet von Froreich, Petronella Grönroos, Hera, Mána Taylor Hjörleifsdóttir, Ho Tzu-Nyen, Fang-Tze Hsu, Hanna Johansson, Annie Jael Kwan, Mari Keski-Korsu, Tanja Kiiveri, Harri Laakso, Michelle Lai & Rocky Howe, Hanna Lakkala, Dana Lam, Lee Weng Choy, Laura Jarvey, Pia Lindman, Ray Langenbach & Olga Spyropoulou, Susie Lingham, Philippa Lovatt, Dennis Low, Lynn Charlotte Lu, Balakrishnan Matchap, Gavin Maughfling,  Ramia Mazé, Nguyen Trin Thi, Ng Yi-Sheng, Nurul Huda Rashid, Rama Ardana, Ong Fang Zheng, Sidd Perez, Filipa Ramos, Marietta Radomska, Stéphane Rennesson, Tania De Rozario, Taina Rajanti, Marian Pastor Roces, Anca Rujoiu, Max Ryynänen, Shireen Seno & John Torres, Shirley Soh, Simon Soon, Christina Stadelbauer, Signe Byrge Sørensen, Ulla Taipale, Juria Toramae, Antti Tenetz, Maria Villa, Roxana Waterson, Jason Wee, Theresa Wong, Fond Worapoj, Tintin Wulia, Yee-I-Lann and Zarina Muhammad. 

www.migrantecologies.org

My work is deeply inspired by natural forms, particularly the branching systems of trees, roots, rivers and human arteries, as well as the elaborate chaos of tangled vines. I observe complex patterns of flowing, twisting fibers, and nature’s mode of creating variety within repetition. These forms, along with more geometric, often architectural structures, have become part of a visual vocabulary I use to relay my experience of existence—from conveying the pulse of nature to mirroring humans’ capacity for creation and destruction. I allow forms to dance, smother, tangle, break and escape in an attempt to express the mix of awe, reverence, anxiety and hope I feel living on Earth in the Twenty-First Century.

For the BiodiverSEEDy project, I created small hand-bound books containing pages printed from woodblocks, collagraphs and screens. The repeated and layered patterns are inspired by observing and contemplating the interdependence of life on Earth.

Bio: Mary Robinson gardens, observes the natural world and prints on paper and fabric to explore the ideas of interdependence and reclamation.

www.marysdrawings.com

My artistic research focuses on reprocessing social, political and environmental themes and on synthesizing ethno-cultural codes, investigated during journeys and several artist residencies program all around the world. Next to photography, site specific installation and video I produce trans-disciplinary projects, which emphasize environmental and social aspects; like in the two-year long project Journey into Fragility oriented towards the perception of the future in relation to climate. For the Agri/Cultures I have created a photographic archive of edible Italian Flowers, each one accompany by a traditional recipe. Agro-biodiversity is an important aspect of agricultural sustainability, for this reason new edible plants is considered an efficient strategy for food safety. 

Post Human Garden, Plants, sound system, screens, cellular material, photocells, Variable dimension, 2011. Courtesy Contemporary Art Museum Villa Croce

Ifana (details), n. 13 photos print on rinkbond, 30 x 40 cm, 2017.

Future – Nature – Culture, Moss sphere + sound, 60 cm diameter, 2013.

Artist Garden, Plants, wheelbarrows, panels, Variable dimension, 2010.

US Food Patent (detail), n.3 photos + n.3 tubes + 3 seeds, 2009.

Bio: Working and living in nomadic condition, my work is focused on reprocessing and resetting social, political and environmental themes. Visual Artist, Owner and Director Mbrart Monaco; Associate Curator presso CCANW; Co-Curator presso Unimediamodern Gallery; Owner and Director Festival for the Earth; Ideator Social Soups Artists Residence Program; Cultural Advisor Dante Alighieri Monaco

www.rebeccaballestra.com 

www.echoesofthevoid.com

www.labrysproject.com

www.socialsoups.com

In April, 2018, I had the opportunity to travel with a group of artists to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on a remote island between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Already home to the largest collection of seeds varieties in the world, the mountain also now houses artwork that makes explicit the connections between seeds and culture, art and science.

As part of this larger effort to nurture connections between biodiversity and creative culture, I developed (In)Nascence, a series of mixed media drawings that evoke the earliest stages of seed germination. Based on my observations of germinating bean seeds, the drawings are portraits of the embryonic, nascent, moment when conditions are optimal for growth and potential is activated.

Bio: Sara Schneckloth’s studio practice is motivated by the question of how science, imagination, and the body inform one another through the activity of drawing.

www.saraschneckloth.com

www.instagram.com/saraschneckloth/

For as long as agriculture has existed women have been preserving agricultural biodiversity by saving seeds to ensure crops adapted to their specific ecosystem are passed from generation to generation. Seeds InService (SIS), a collaborative project of Melissa H. Potter and Maggie Puckett, honors and continues this legacy by cultivating historical and endangered heirloom cropswhose stories we examine with a feminist lens through the slow art of hand papermaking. As colonialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism have failed to protect diversity, violated natural laws of interdependent life, and triggered an age of extreme climate change, socially engaged artists must build sustainable and ultimately healing art practices.

1. An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank, Melissa H. Potter and Maggie Puckett, 152 page catalog and artists’ book documenting the past five years of artmaking, gardening, seed saving, collaboration and research, 2019.

2. Feminist Gardens Everywhere, Maggie Puckett, 18 x 5 x 3 inches (closed), Artist’s book containing 12 handmade seed packets of heirloom varieties grown out in our gardens in Chicago. Varieties include Hopi red dye amaranth, calendula, clary sage, Tetapeche gray mottled cowpea, elecampane, flax, okra, poppy, safflower, sorghum, Hopi black dye sunflower, and yarrow. The book is constructed with handmade paper made from flax, corn, and tomato grown by SIS, 2019.

3. Baba Yaga’s Medicinal Tea, Melissa H. Potter and Maggie Puckett, A mixture of medicinal herbs, roots and flowers grown by SIS and featured in artistic interventions and events to highlight the thematic concepts of our work and encourage education about food and feminist healing wisdom. Ingredients: Borage, calamint, calendula, clary sage, feverfew, nasturtium, pennyroyal, rue, tansy, tulsi, and yarrow, 2018.

4. Seeds InService: A Timeline: A year in the life of an ecofeminist art project, Maggie Puckett, Mixed fiber handmade paper (potato vine, lettuce stalk, mushroom, nasturtium vine, abaca, cotton) with inclusions (soil, leaves, mixed vegetable seeds), found paper (Seed Savers Exchange seed catalog), thread, ink, 24 x 5.5 x 1 inches, 2015.

5. The Papermaker’s Garden, Melissa H. Potter and Maggie Puckett, Documentation of Seeds InService’s Pre-Colonial Gardens at The Papermaker’s Garden of Columbia College, Chicago, 2016.

6. Maggie Puckett and Melissa H. Potter creating handmade paper seed packets out of corn stalks, husks, and leaves, 2016.

7. It Will Never Rain Roses: Bosnian Magic Garden Tea Event, Melissa H. Potter, A garden performance featuring teas grown in the Bosnian Magic Garden bed with special guest and tea curator, Tatjana Jovancevic, a member of the Chicago Bosnian diaspora. Featuring traditional medicines and ethnobotanical heritage of the Balkans, where Potter has worked with women for nearly 20 years, 2016.

Bios: Melissa H. Potter is a multi-media artist, writer, and curator who exhibits internationally. She has been funded by organizations such as Fulbright, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Crafts Research Fund for her art and curatorial projects including the exhibition, Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art. She is an Associate Professor in the Art & Art History Program teaching in the MFA in Book & Paper Program at Columbia College Chicago. Her critical essays on art have been printed in magazines including BOMB, Art Papers, and Flash Art.

Maggie Puckett’s work is interdisciplinary, combining art and science to explore the complicated history and future of anthropogenic effects on the Earth’s systems. Through handmade paper, artist’s books, and environmental works her practice navigates our planet from atmosphere to core, examining ecological history and visualizing predictions of future global change. The work has engaged audiences at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and galleries nationwide in a traveling exhibition, Pulped Under Pressure.

Seeds InService: A Papermaking Institute (SIS) is an ecofeminist, socially-engaged art practice by Melissa Potter and Maggie Puckett that supports self-determining communities through heirloom seed management, thematic gardening, and hand papermaking arts activism. Through collaborative and community art projects that range from propagating rare seeds in partnership with national heirloom banks, to public events featuring the untold narratives of women in agriculture, we make visible, and propose solutions to, the modes of production that exploit the labors of women and nature.

www.seedsinservice.com

www.instagram.com/seedsinservice

www.facebook.com/seedsinservice

We have always been biohackers. For 10,000 years creative individuals and groups have bred plants, selecting for desired traits and passing this information on through saved seeds. Although methods for saving and sharing seeds are quite straightforward, most commercial farmers today don’t save seeds because of legal restrictions, inconvenience, or the preference for hybrid varieties which don’t breed true and must be purchased each year. Plant breeding and selling seeds has been highly consolidated in the last twenty years, with three large companies controlling over half the world market share in seed sales. Food Phreaking issue 04: SEEDS will uncover some of the stories hidden in this history, and provide alternative visions for a future in which seeds are open, shared, and a collective resource.

Food Phreaking: SEEDS // Food Phreaking is the journal of experiments, exploits, and explorations of the human food system. The SEEDS poster collection is a precursor for Food Phreaking Issue 04, which takes a look at the tiny embryos of plant life that carry the genetic data of our food system: SEEDS. Previous issues of Food Phreaking have examined Fruits (01), InVitro Meat (02) and Microbiome (03) and will also be included in the exhibition.

All images are credited to The Center for Genomic Gastronomy. Materials: risograph printed publications. Dimensions: A6 book. Year of production: 2013-ongoing.

Bio: The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an artist-led think tank that examines the biotechnology and biodiversity of human food systems.

www.genomicgastronomy.com

www.instagram.com/genomicgastronomy/

twitter: @centgg

#genomicgastronomy

1. Folding lattice for agriculture in dry areas I: 13"x14," pen and ink, 2018

2. Folding lattice for agriculture in dry areas II: 13"x14," pen and ink, 2018

Bio: Mollie Goldstrom's recent art practice explores seaweed as an object of curiosity, optimism, and transcendence and a reflection of human and environmental exploitation and devastation. Interlocking narratives encompassing many centuries and coastal environments converge around macroalgae in its many uses and morphologies. Amidst anxiety about forces outside individual control or comprehension; a rising climate of societal and ecological collapse, drawing, writing, and cookery become means of creating wonder and understanding.
www.instagram.com/kelp.desk