TRAVELLING PLANTS

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Plants have travelled alongside humans for centuries, crossing geographical, cultural and ecological boundaries. Their movement may be deliberate — through trade, cultivation, botanical exchange and migration — or accidental, through seeds carried in soil, on clothing, animals, tools and means of transport. Once introduced into a new environment, plants may continue to spread independently of the human movement that initially brought them there.

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Travelling Plants investigates this movement of plants between Japan and the Netherlands, with particular attention to the historical role of Dejima in Nagasaki. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dejima functioned as an important point of contact between Japan and the Netherlands and became part of a wider exchange of plants, seeds, botanical knowledge and methods of classification. Plants transported through these networks entered new environments, where some were cultivated while others escaped cultivation, naturalised or became part of local ruderal vegetation.

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The project follows selected plant species whose histories reveal these movements and transformations. Rather than approaching them solely as botanical specimens or evidence of human history, I am interested in the plant itself as both subject and material presence. Its current form, location and material properties are the result of an accumulation of interactions between human activity and processes that continue beyond direct human control.

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This raises a central question within the project: where does human-directed movement end and the plant's own ecological dispersal begin? A plant may have arrived because of trade, migration or cultivation, yet subsequent generations respond to soil, climate, disturbance, competition and other organisms within their new environment. The project therefore considers travelling not as a single historical journey, but as an ongoing process of relocation, adaptation and transformation.

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Through fieldwork, botanical and archival research, analogue photographic registration and the use of plant-derived colour, Travelling Plants brings these different temporal and material histories together. The plant is not used merely to illustrate a historical narrative, nor is its colour treated simply as a photographic tool. Plant, colour, photographic material and historical context operate alongside one another as subjects and material carriers of meaning.

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By tracing plants across different places and periods, Travelling Plants examines how histories of human exchange become entangled with biological processes that do not conform to the same geographical or temporal boundaries. The project approaches the travelling plant as a living material record: shaped by human movement, yet continuously transformed through its interactions with the environments in which it grows.