Intraterrestrial Botanist (2021-2022)

Les yeux dans l’eau, Curated by Geneviève Wallen
Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, QC

Intraterrestrial Botanist continues my long-standing fascination with underwater imaginaries, vegetal intelligence, and the subtle exchanges between bodies, environments, and forms of care.

At the centre of this iteration is Memory of an Imaginary Aqueous Garden (2021), a dynamic sculpture composed of blown glass vessels, metallic textiles, seeds, grains, tubing, air pumps, aquatic plants, and 3D-printed forms. Within this constellation, water circulates as a living medium. Growth forms inspired by submerged worlds glow, breathe, and shift. Light refracts across glass, surface, and leaf, creating a quiet choreography of reflection and movement.

During this phase of the series, I turned toward natural healing systems that work with the vibrational imprint of plants immersed in water. Drawing from the Bach Flower Remedies, developed by Dr. Edward Bach (1886–1936), who aligned 38 flowering plants with emotional and psychological states. I explored how resonance, attention, and plant presence can influence human perception. This research became both conceptual framework and embodied practice: a way of tuning myself toward the affective qualities of plants, to the atmospheres of place, and to the minute shifts in my own emotional weather.

I gathered and created flower essences from both “wild” plants near my family’s acreage at Tail Creek (Nevis, Alberta) and from cultivated flowers in my former garden in Red Deer (Treaty 6/7, Waskasoo Seepee). Certain species seemed to return insistently; yarrow, fireweed, goldenrod, borage, hollyhock, wild rose, as if inviting continued attention.

Traditional Bach methods rely on picking flowers and immersing them in spring water beneath the full summer sun. In contrast, I designed and commissioned a series of hand-blown glass vessels that allow essences to be created without removing the blossoms from the plant. These vessels hang lightly from branches or architectural supports, capturing sunlight, shadow, and the vibrational presence of the plant in situ. They appear in Tree (2022), a sculptural assemblage of wood, cast aluminum branches, blown glass, flowers, and grains.

I’m a fly with one eye and
windsong’s tide amongst our perpetual autoflow (2022, 7 min)

The accompanying video works trace the landscapes where essences were gathered: the rural pond edge, the urban backyard garden, the shifting atmospheres between them. These films offer glimpses into the gestures of making, the plants encountered, and the subtle ecosystems that shaped the emotional and material research.

Finally, the stainless-steel laser-cut panels, Meditations on Water (24” × 24”), translate speculative drawings into architectural surfaces. Each panel imagines the vibrational trace of an entity impressed into water, from the echo of a raindrop falling from a snail shell into dry soil, to the theoretical turbulence of an ice crystal tumbling through a black hole. These meditations ask how forms, forces, and beings are continually cycling into one another through states of matter, memory, and imagination.

Intraterrestrial Botanist explores water as both archive and conduit as an element that carries story, vibration, relation, and speculative possibility.

Photography: François Lafrance, courtesy of Foreman Art Gallery
Supported by a Research-Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.