Archive of Stolen Seeds
Archive of Stolen Seeds (cyanotype collage on paper, 841 x 1189mm) is a critical reading of Kew’s role in the British imperial project as told through the rubber tree’s story. In 1876, British plant collector Henry Wickham illegally transported 70, 000 seeds from the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, to Kew Gardens. From there, they were shipped to colonies in British Malay and Ceylon to be propagated in plantations. Kew and its archives – that ordered, collected and exported botanical knowledge – were essential to colonisation, where plant transfers like that of the rubber tree transformed entire ecologies and societies.
The artwork abstracts the archive, where the archival artefact is imaged and re-imaged through my camera, the printed negative and the blurry effects of the final exposed cyanotype. An X-ray of the botanical archive, it questions how botanical knowledge is produced, conserved and disseminated. In the gaps and distortions created by the cyanotype process, we begin to wonder: whose voices are absent from the institutional archive?
Archive of Stolen Seeds was exhibited in ‘The Active Image: Political Ecologies & Photographic Agency’, a group exhibition curated by the Sustainable Darkroom with the Folk House Darkroom at the Create Gallery in Bristol, September 2024.