ClasticsMucor mecedo L
What prevails in herbariabut considerable enlargements,and disassembling parts?
Resinous models that highly gloss?Fast colours,and textures that don’t wane?
Models that counteractthe paucity of the lens? Pupilsas tossed stones?
When cut, the true plant emits an ultrasonic caoine.I confessfield musics mostly elude me.I follow the guiding seamof the mantle over the armature;
the crest of the standing water wave.(I have been sweptoff a pier, by a seiche.)
Terracotta, wax, glass and plasterwill suffer me to enter.When I seek to please the wild gods—I need plastics!
I need catalogues of fruitsfor the creeping agronomics;I need scaling capabilities, andtractable botanics!I want perfect imitationthat I might glean the supple magics
of these specimens pinned here and nowunder incandescent logics.
Fragile, but aren’t we all!We were never supposed
to see ourselves.Only as rippled figure in lake;only as fractals in pondskimmer’s wake.
One eye straddling two waves;the other that looked on.
Colleen Coco Collins
NOTES
Clastics, from the Greek klao, is a term coined in the 1820s by Dr. Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux (1797-1880), considered the first to adapt the technique to create disassembled specimens of the human body, although he also developed a series of zoological and botanical models starting in 1869. Clastics denote large-sized model objects, equipped with mobile and disassembly parts. (Artifact Flora. History, Technology and Conservation of the Brendel Botanical Model Collection at the Complutense University of Madrid)
herbaria: a collection of preserved plant specimens maintained for scientific purposes
caoine: Irish funeral song, accompanied by wailing (English spelling is ‘keen’). (-Dictionary.com)
seiche: a temporary disturbance or oscillation in the water level of a lake or partially enclosed body of water, especially one caused by changes in atmospheric pressure. (-Oxford Languages)
Antique botanical models are transplanted into an intimate virtual space in this video installation by Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux, with words by Colleen Coco Collins. Soloed within a groundless void, institutional and museological contexts dissolve as each model is rendered in precise cinematic detail. Radicant invites us to trace down the long roots of our present-day emotional, epistemological, and agro-economic relationships to plants and fungi.
The Brendel Company (Berlin, late 1880s – 1920s) made detailed models of plants and fungi from papier-mâché, glass beads, gelatin, and feathers. Tiny latches open to allow the removal of components, revealing their inner workings. They were purchased as teaching tools by institutions worldwide.
The collection featured in Radicant is from the Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago Department of Botany in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux would like to thank Colleen Coco Collins, Struts Gallery, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Dr. Pamela Cornes, Dr. Janice Lord, and the Botany department at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka The University of Otago. This work has been developed as part of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka The University of Otago.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
COLLEEN COCO COLLINS [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen, and fox.
MIRANDA BELLAMY AND AMANDA FAUTEUX are partners and artistic collaborators who share time living in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), Aotearoa (New Zealand) and within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki known as Sackville, New Brunswick. Their collaborative practice identifies and extends the stories of plants through site-specific research and experimentation. By listening to plants and responding through interdisciplinary projects, they make space for the critical revision of human and particularly settler-colonial histories and to reflect on material accountability, reciprocity, and ways of seeing. They have exhibited their work and attended residencies in Aotearoa, Canada, UK, and the USA. Their work was recognised on the 2023 Sobey Art Award longlist. They are the 2024 Frances Hodgkins Fellows at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka the University of Otago in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa.