This project is a year-long, durational work where I apologize to a different plant every day through speech, sculpture, ceramic, and written text. Forests burn around the world and we feel we can do nothing but grieve for them. But what if we apologize? Through apology we recognize wrongs and the need for change. Each apology is in itself insufficient — an expected failure that carries the hope of an eventual win and the possibility of mutual transformation. Failure is not the ability to reach a certain goal but an opportunity to look at utopia from the other side. I experiment everyday in how to become coequal kin with botanical life by confronting the harm humanity causes.
As I perpetually apologize, I see the tendrils of regret, guilt, and hope twirl between ceramicized apologies and my annotated calendars. Can you see the direction the tendrils are morphing? I am worried that no one else can see the wind that blows through my practice. So let me show you: out of my grid-like calendars, tendrils of air move, shivering blue and green; like a CGI animation reaching for the objects that they embody. As May relates to July, boxes three and 28 bridge the gap of white wall by swooshing out a stream of turquoise, from that flow breaks off a new stream to the ceramic panel six feet away. As I look at my installation, I see a blue-green dust storm straight out of Fantasia animation studios. The wind follows my past, present, and future intentions with the slow moving tentacular vines. If you still can’t see what I see, flip to any page in a book: read the written apology out loud while you trace the daily drawing with your finger, your lips, let your senses be filled with desire.
What do you desire? I desire to be thoughtful, to love the way I wish to be loved. To protect those with all my heart even when I am not brave. Squint a little, close your eyes, let the nanobots of plantal healing fly at hyperspeed through your arteries. Open your eyes. The tendrils shoot (drip) from your eyes as you become entangled with apologies. What once looked to you like a whitebox gallery installation is now laced with a Mycorrhizal network clove hitch knotted. When you breathe in, the spores coat your throat. You don’t feel any better, your conscience weighs just as heavy or heavier as when you picked up this book and entered my world.
Welcome by the way, I forgot to say that, I’ve forgotten how to host humans. And yet, as you will see/seen, I don’t know how to host plants either. The point is that I am a human and I am trying my best and that is beautiful, and that is powerful, and that I need to do this. I had a vision in December of 2021. To understand how I began, go back to the first book, or skip ahead a bit and see how I finish, if I finish. All I can do is promise, I pinky swear on Donna Haraway, Wynn Alan Bruce, and the roses from my childhood garden, I promise to keep courting failure, to understand my relationship with the botanical a pinch better.
