Travelling plants. (in progress...)
 

Travelling Plants explores plants as travellers: organisms that move between places through human exchange, trade, migration and accidental dispersal. The project takes Dejima in Nagasaki as a historical point of departure, a place where, for centuries, plants, seeds, botanical knowledge and other materials travelled between Japan and Europe.

 

The project connects to my earlier research into botany, natural plant colour, their environments and material transformations. In previous projects, I have worked with plants collected from specific locations, documenting and transforming their colours and chemical properties through analogue photographic processes. Travelling Plants extends this research by shifting the focus from the plant as a fixed specimen to the plant as a moving entity.

 

Plants do not travel only when deliberately transported. Seeds cling to clothing, animals and tools; roots and fragments are carried with soil; seeds are exchanged, cultivated and traded; species escape from gardens and become part of new environments. Through these intended and unintended movements, plants cross borders and establish themselves elsewhere.

Dejima becomes a historical lens through which to consider these movements. Its history of controlled exchange between Japan and the outside world makes it a particularly compelling place to investigate how botanical material, knowledge and culture travelled. From this specific site, the project opens into a wider reflection on the movement of plants across continents and through time.

 

The project follows these journeys not as a linear history, but as a network of encounters, transfers and transformations. A plant may begin in one place, be deliberately moved to another, and subsequently continue travelling on its own—spontaneously travelling beyond the intended exchange.

In this sense, Travelling Plants is also a continuation of my broader interest in the relationship between human intervention and natural processes. The project asks where human exchange ends and autonomous dispersal begins, and how plants participate in histories of movement that are often written primarily from a human perspective.

The plant becomes both material and messenger: carried, exchanged, transformed and eventually released into another environment.