Kirjahaku

Well-known for her installations and public art commissions that engage with architectural and biological forms, Janet Laurence is fascinated by the interplay of plant species, animals and people. In her work, represented in all major collections in Australia, Laurence constructs atmospheric spaces that allow for deep reflection on questions of ecology and extinction.Here, Prudence Gibson surveys Laurence’s BioArt, and her radical interpretation of humanity’s relationship with the world.

The Plant Thieves reveals remarkable stories from the National Herbarium of New South Wales – its people, its archives and its most guarded specimens.Who gets to collect plants, name them, propagate them, extract their chemicals, sell them and use them? Whose knowledge is it? And what can the people that work with plants, just outside the law, teach us about plant care?In The Plant Thieves, Prudence Gibson explores the secrets of the National Herbarium of New South Wales and unearths remarkable stories of plant naming wars, rediscovered lost species, First Nations agriculture, illegal drug labs and psychoactive plant knowledge.Gibson reveals the tale of the anti-inflammatory plant that saved a herbarium manager when she was collecting in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, stories about the secret wollemi pine plantation (from one of its botanical guardians) and the truth about a beach daisy that has changed so much in 100 years that it needs to be completely reclassified. She also follows the story of the black bean Songline, a recent collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, to find the route of this important agriculture plant.The Plant Thieves is both a lament for lost and disappearing species and a celebration of being human, of wanting to collect things and of learning more about plant life and ourselves.

Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of 'nature' and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative perspectives, from evolutionary biology to literary theory, philosophy to poetry, which respond to the perplexing problems and paradoxes of vegetal thinking.Representations of vegetal life often include plant analogies and plant imagery. These representations have at times obscured the diversity of plant behavior and experience. Covert Plants probes the implications of vegetal life for thought and how new plant science is changing our perception of the vegetal - around us and in us. How can we think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human-nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about the always complex relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object?A full view of this shifting perspective requires a 'stereoscopic' lens through which to view plants, but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling 'subjects, ' 'stakeholders, ' or 'actors.' As such, the plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation itself. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants' ability to communicate, sense, and learn require intensive, cross-disciplinary investigation. By doing this, we can intervene into current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and hopefully revise, for the better, human philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics that touch upon plant life.TABLE OF CONTENTS// Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson, "Introduction: Covert Plants" - Prudence Gibson and Michael Marder, "Art Expresses Its Own Appearance: A Conversation with Michael Marder" - Prudence Gibson, "The Colour Green" - Baylee Brits, "Brain Trees: Neuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought" - Dalia Nassar, "Metaphoric Plants: Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason" - Stephen Muecke, "Mixed up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming" - Monica Gagliano, "Eco-psychology and the Return to the Dream of Nature" - Suzanne Anker, "The Blue Rose" - Susie Pratt, "Trees as Landlords and Other Public Experiments: An Interview with Natalie Jeremijenko" - Tessa Laird, "Spores from Space: Becoming the Alien" - Jennifer Mae Hamilton, "Gardening After the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney" - Lucas Ihlein, "Agricultural Inventiveness: Beyond Environmental Management?" - Andrew Belletty, "An Ear to the Ground" - Ben Woodard, "Continuous Green Abstraction: Embodied Knowledge, Intuition, and Metaphor" - Lisa Dowdall, "Figures" - Poems by Luke Fischer, Justin Clemens, Paul Dawson, and Tamryn Bennett.

The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.