Bindweed

As I dug deep in my raised beds, I became fascinated by the looping shapes of the rhizomic roots I pulled, akin to patterns I had used in previous bodies of work. While the visual patterns are easy to see, the metaphorical patterns run deeper, as deep as Convolvulus Arvensis, aka Bindweed, can burrow. It sprouted from seeds brought by the first colonialists to plant the lawns that Europeans used to signal power and domination over nature, lawns cultivated by enslaved people for aesthetics as opposed to sustenance. As any gardener can tell you, bindweed chokes out everything else and is nearly impossible to eradicate. Alfred Crosby noted that this destruction of native plant species was “directly tied to the forced and brutal removal of Indigenous people from the land”.

This installation contains two summers’ of extraditing these destructive forms from deep under the soil and composing them into closed systems. It reminds us that we are constantly surrounded on stolen land by the noxious traces of our history, and of the labor required to eradicate the roots - both literally and figuratively - of environmental imperialism and white supremacy.