This practice-as-research PhD explores the inextricable entanglement of botanical
art with liberatory queer (and) decolonial (and) feminist artmaking practices and
violent legacies. Flowers, present in our gardens, parks, roadsides and homes, are often overlooked as benign presences, an Enlightenment-influenced attitude that
names plants as passive entities (Wandersee and Schussler). Within this research
project, flowers, as living plants, painted objects and/or metaphors, act as
companions in praxis and have a direct impact on the research, ethics, aesthetics and
structure of the project. The central aim of this project is not to redeem or redress
the violent history of botanical art, but rather, through a succession of illustrated and
interwoven arguments, to illuminate how dwelling with the history and present of
botanical art, through a form of slow scholarship, can offer a new botanically
entangled approach to academic study as a form of queer (and) decolonial (and)
feminist world making (Sara Ahmed).
The original artworks included in the project take the form of contemporary
illuminated manuscripts, in which botanical paintings are interwoven with citations
from queer (and) decolonial (and) feminist texts. Created as part of a ‘devotional
citation’ praxis, the artworks are interwoven with the writing and the final
installation brings together the finished artworks and a staging of the domestic space
in which they were made. Informed by a queer (and) decolonial (and) feminist ethics,
the project is rooted in research within Undercommons and Indigenous Studies
(Emma Dabiri, Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, Robin Wall Kimmerer), black feminist
love-politics (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jennifer c. nash) and queer theory (ashon t.
crawley, Amber Jamilla Musser).
The thesis is organised around the life cycles of a flowering plant: Seed & Root;
Sprout & Leaf; Bloom & Pollinate and Wither & Seed. While Seed & Root attends to the
history of British women botanical artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, the links
between plant taxonomy and the foundations of scientific racism, and botanic and
cottage gardens relationship with the colonial weaponization of Christian ideology,
Sprout & Leaf provides a contemporary context for my praxis through exploring the
work of British and North American artists and flower growers working with flowers
as living plants, painted objects and/or metaphors to speak to queer (and) decolonial
(and) feminist liberatory politics, such as Lauren Craig, Benny Nemer, Roisin Taylor and Charmaine Watkiss. Bloom & Pollinate attends to my devotional citation gifting practice, in which the artworks are gifted to the scholars who authored the cited
texts, in an act of honouring the importance of ‘unmet friends’ (Carolyn G. Heilbrun)
and the sensorial embodied acts of reading and citing (ashon t. crawley, Amber
Jamilla Musser). Furthermore, I highlight how the creation of an installation space
that imitates my domestic working environment, and brings together paintings, fresh
flowers and documentation of the movement of my devotional citation artworks,
invites the reader/viewer to engage with a new approach to academic study. Finally,
Wither & Seed considers the scope and limitations of the work and plants the seeds for the future growth of the project.