text taken from my exhibition 'Seditious Weeds', May 2025

For most of my life, I’ve maintained curious relationships with plant-life and much of my drawing and subsequent thoughts have emerged through being alongside plants. With my senses fully switched up, I use drawing as a tool of exploration, especially whilst working out in the field.

My work has been slow and radical, a gradual unpeeling of deadening layers, helped by rooting myself in plant-time––an active turning away from the accepted pace of life in European society.

sedition

1. conduct or speech inciting to rebellion or a breach of public order

2. agitation against the authority of a State

weed

1. a wild plant growing where it is not wanted

A weed is often defined as a wild plant growing in the 'wrong' place.

'Wrong' according to who or what...?

Weeds are typically seen as a nuisance.

A 'nuisance' to who or what...?

to the pollinators? on whom life depends...

to the wild creatures who shelter/feed/sleep amongst them?

I ask: what are we not seeing?

At the scale of a moss, walking through the woods as a six-foot human is a lot like flying over the continent at 32,000 feet. So far above the ground, and on our way to somewhere else, we run the risk of missing an entire realm which lies at our feet. Every day we pass over them without seeing. Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed.

excerpt from 'Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses' by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Oregon State University Press, 2003), with kind permission.

So-called 'pests' and 'weeds' are symptomatic of the complex ecosystem of the world which has been progressively thrown out of balance by aggressive human intervention. Chemical companies embarked on persuasive campaigns to convince us to eradicate, exterminate, obliterate. Agrochemical industries profited; the environment has been savagely degraded.

A green field from a distance looks a pastoral scene but walk the land and it will be near silent. Decades of high yield monoculture have demanded artificial fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and harvesting machinery that dictated loss of hedgerows; we abandoned crop rotation and the vital practice of leaving land fallow. Our soils are depleted and our vital insect populations are in sharp decline. The cost to human health (as well as the health of the planet) is immeasurable.

“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” ―Rachel Carson, ‘Silent Spring’ (1962)

By contrast, enter an upland hay meadow (managed gently, without application of pesticides or artificial fertilisers) and listen to the hum of life; witness the changing parade of wildflowers and grasses, rich in nutrients and nectar, a haven for pollinators and home to creatures of many kinds. For many years, meadow wildflowers were classed as ‘weeds’.

We have witnessed the catastrophic loss of 97% of our upland hay meadows since 1930s due to methods of agricultural intensification.

“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”

―Rachel Carson, ‘Silent Spring’ (1962)

We need to come back down to earth

We're encouraged to demonise certain plants rather than examine the motive behind the labelling. The environment has been 'valued' largely on its usefulness and profitability to man, based on extraction and exploitation. We continue to act as if the natural world was ours for the taking, oblivious to the complexities and connectedness of all things on this planet.

How did we ever think this was all just for us?

Do you see dandelions as a scourge?

Pollinators would disagree. As might the soil and neighbouring plants.

It's important to know who is dictating which plants are ‘weeds’ and why.

So often, these motives change with time and place and culture.

A radical change in our point of view is urgently required.

We need to come back down to earth.

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