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. The artists also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Artists Bios
Miranda Bellamy & Amanda Fauteux
Miranda Bellamy & 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.
Colleen Coco Collins
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.