ART

Beyond Plant Blindness - Seeing the Importance of Plants for a Sustainable World
The Green Box 2020 ISBN 9783962160012 Acqn 30603
Pb 17x24cm 168pp col ills £26

The book stems from the pedagogical, art and botanical project of the same name, undertaken
between 2015 and 2018 by a core team of researchers - artists Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir & Mark
Wilson, Dawn Sanders and Eva Nyberg (plant science educators) and Bente Eriksen (botanist).

The team set out to urge a philosophical and actionable move beyond the cultural condition of
"plant blindness" and so to disrupt what is a traditional and debilitating human view. Despite the
challenges, there is a need for humans to engage conceptually and responsibly with non-human
organisms, possessing entirely different physiologies and behaviours. In our engagement with
such difference, it is vital that we are not diverted into subjecting plants to human registers and
'terms of resemblance', (Houle, 2011) but rather to engage with their 'plantness' (Darley, 1990),
an approach equating to 'parities in meeting' (Snaebjornsdottir & Wilson 2010).

Snaebjornsdottir & Wilson's work took multiple forms during the period of the project but was
manifest publicly in 2017 as three intervention/installations on as many sites in 'Botaniska', the
Botanical Gardens in Gothenburg, Sweden. Working closely with plant biologists and plant
hunters there, they investigated the far-flung provenances of specific 'exotic' plants within the
Gardens and explored the historic and mysteriously, local incidence of a soon-to-be-extinct
species of grass - together with its extraordinary life cycle.

Sanders, writes through an analysis of accumulated data, engaging with student teacher and
public visitor responses to the art interventions in Gothenburg, Botanical Gardens.
Eriksen writes on 'interpretation' strategies and methods through visual means in the public
presentation of plants in the context of the Anthropocene and extinction.

Other authors include Dawn Sanders (plant science educator), Bente Eriksen (botanist),
Giovanni Aloi, (Editor in Chief of Antennae; The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Lynn Turner,
(Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths), Ramsey Affifi, (University of Edinburgh) and Olof Gerdur
Sigfusdottir (University of Iceland). Edited by Mark Wilson, Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Dawn
Sanders.

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