you left me in a ditch: unaware, uncared for, unknown   (2021-2022)

Cotton fabric, synthetic thread, cotton embroidery thread, various homemade natural dyes, pinewood, soil, acrylic paint, plastic buckets, second hand jars, thrifted poison awareness pin, field/research notebook, and plant matter. Main frame with embroidered fabric measures roughly 152cm x 213cm x 30cm. 

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This work was included in Heterotopia Garden in 2023 and Garden Variety Volume IV in 2022, click here for documentation of Garden Variety Volume IV. 

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bunk 

carrot fern 

cigue maculee

conium maculatum 

deadman’s oatmeal 

fool’s parsley

hemlock

kecksies 

poison hemlock

poison parsley

poison parsnip 

poison root

snake-weed

spotted hemlock

wild carrot

wild parsnip

wode whistle...

Entangled within the wildflowers, lies an imposter of their beauty and close cousin of our supermarket staples. Remembered through the rigorous research of scientists, old and new, yet remains widely unknown in the public’s eyes. Except for when tragedy strikes a naive forager, or when an eager philosophy student learns about your connection to Socrates, though you are wrongly accused to be the cause of his death.

For you can bring death to both the ill informed or the expert botanist, due to the labyrinth of misidentification and misinformation which surrounds you. 

We should know that your hairless stems are wine-stained, and that your leaves reek of urine when crushed. That even if the smallest flower, leaf, or seed is ingested; our heart rate will quicken, and body temperature will plummet. Your conine poison will slowly intoxicate our nerves leading to muscle paralysis, respiratory arrest, and finally death. You have no cure that we know of, yet we are no longer taught how to identify you from the crowd. 

How could we become illiterate about what grows within our backyards, ravines, and ditches? We brought you here with purpose, upon our boats as a medicinal remedy, and you have flourished in this new land. We used you for scirrhous, epilepsy, abortions, and asthma until 1934, but after studying your toxicity for hundreds of years, we learned that you could not be our cure. 

Today, you have been left behind to grow wild on the roadside; and we have become unaware of your poisonous presence.


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