2023, CARDIFF, WALES
THE BOTANIST
EXHIBITED AT CHAPTER ARTS CENTRE
CURATED BY SIMRATH PANASER
Taking Michael Pollan’s book ‘The Botany of Desire’ as a starting point, Myfanwy examines four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato, each identified by Pollan as evolving and multiplying across the world over centuries, to gratify human desire.
Across different media, Myfanwy interrogates our mutually entangled histories through these rooted beings. Cultivating a vegetal gaze, from the fateful apple that brought about Adam and Eve’s downfall in the Bible to the humble potato, she reconciles us with the botanical world, magnifying the interdependency and symbiotic relationship between plants and humans.
At the centre of the exhibition is ‘Fallen’, a monumental wooden sculpture depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Inspired by a small historical sculpture from the collection of the Gherdëina Museum in Ortisei, Italy, an apple is held by Eve and fallen fruit lies at the feet of the figures. However, the Tree of Knowledge is felled. Within a forest of stumps, Adam and Eve appear as mascot-like stewards of a tree-less anthropocentric paradise. Nearby, ‘Unless’ replicates the apple tree of the historical sculpture and compared to the scale of ‘Fallen’ it appears miniature, a spectral souvenir of nature past.
Non-human beings often appear as backdrops to our lives, yet here carved from wood, Myfanwy reminds us that Adam and Eve’s presence is inextricably connected to the trees that are absent -she asks how can our kinship with non- human life create the conditions for our mutual survival?
The proliferation and control of nature is explored in ‘Pink Rot’, an installation of identically cast potatoes. The title of the work refers to the pink rot potato disease which is endemic in soils where the crop is repeatedly grown. This monocultural approach to farming over perennial polycultures has developed in tandem with capitalist efficiencies. While genetic modifications may counter disease and increase yield, the impact of intensive farming on soil erosion and biodiversity is still held within the land.The potatoes of ‘Pink Rot’ are witness to this – alluringly pink, cloned immaculately, though heavy and dead. Using the language of minimalism and pop –art, Myfanwy creates an unsettling monument to our agro-ecologies.
‘Mothership’ is a seductive 3D-printed sculpture of a cannabis bud of an elite clone. ‘Elite Clones’ are special female cannabis plants that marijuana growers discovered and kept alive in clone form. Commercial marijuana plants are all genetically female; cannabis plants don’t declare their gender until they’re mature. The solution is to plant clones instead of seeds —cuttings taken.
from the established female ‘mother’. As long as a female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, adding to the length of its flower. Due to this sexual frustration, the plant continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resins, the active ingredient in cannabis. Plants replicate and challenge the hierarchies of human life and Myfanwy’s ‘Mothership’ considers how gender has been cultivated to serve our desire for altered states.
An emblem of intertwined yellow tulips features on the hand-painted flag, ‘Figure of a Woman’, a riff on satirical heraldic flags found in the allegorical artworks of Hendrik Gerritsz Pot’s painting ‘Wagon of Fools’ (circa 1632) and Pieter Nolpe’s etching ‘Flora’s Fool’s Cap’ (circa 1637) which mock the craze of Tulipmania in Holland during the 1630s. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, features in both of these historical works, symbolic of the gendered conventions of flowers her presence also feminises the folly of Tulipmania. In contrast to these works, Myfanwy’s flag asks us to reconsider the feverish impulses of Tulipmania. Flying solemnly, it communicates the commoditisation of plant life to serve speculation agendas. It can also be interpreted as a flag for Flora, giving status to her powerful identity that crosses the threshold between human and plant life.
Taking on the role of a botanist, Myfanwy reflects on the ways plants are, to use feminist writer and activist Donna Haraway’s term, our ‘companion species’.
The works in the exhibition serve to germinate our consciousness of plants and their agency, asserting the co-dependency of human- plant relationships.
Photos: Stuart Whipps