In my current residency at The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, I have been working alongside botanists and a wider research team in the UK and Brazil, to examine the collections of botanist and explorer Richard Spruce, who spent 14 years in the Amazon in the mid-19th Century. Plantae Amazonicae (taken from the name Spruce gave to his botanical notebooks from his years in the Amazon) is an exhibition that represents my first encounters with Spruce’s ethnobotanical artefacts, herbarium specimens and notebooks, working with significant materials and processes found in the collection
The work has been made in collaboration with Cultural Historian Luciana Martins (Birkbeck, University of London), Ethnobotanist William Milliken (Kew) and Museum Curator Mark Nesbitt (Kew), with photography by Elena Heatherwick. Supported by Arts Council England
Unfired clay vessel (jaguar). Clay dug from riverbeds, with charcoal from Equisetum
arvense mixed with jenipapo fruit (Genipa americana)
Unfired clay vessel (monkey)
Spruce describes how clay was collected from the river and mixed with the bark of the caraipé tree (Licania octandra), to make pottery; “The Indians test Caraipé by burning it; and if, when burnt, it cannot be broken by the fingers, but requires the use of a mortar, it is considered good.” The clay artefacts that Spruce collected could be from any place. The fingerprints, marks and sharp points that have been dug into their surfaces transcend time. The clays I used were dug from the ground and mixed with silica rich Equisetum arvense. The process of collecting, drying, rolling and carving is fundamental and guided by material. All of it remains unfired. It is not about survival or legacy, but rather about the brevity of time, and transformation of material.
Untitled (shelf). Unfired clay from riverbeds with plant fibres, Bixa orellana pigment, Fridericia chica dye on silk
Fridericia chica on canvas
Astrocaryum vulgare, Firefan. Firefan made from ‘Tucuma’ Palm, Astrocaryum vulgare.
Tucuma palm weaving
PODOSTEMACEAE
There is a large jar of grey salt, that I first saw sitting heavily in a low drawer in the Economic Botany Collection. I went to the Herbarium to find the corresponding specimens that Spruce collected, and found many more than I imagined there; some sheets containing only the tiniest specimens perhaps 2cm tall, and some indented heavily by the weight of the thick leaves. There were many small drawings and annotations on them too: A note in Spruce’s elegant handwriting on the label of one reads, “I was nearly too late for this fine thing”. Reading that, it’s as he is saying “I am here”. And I was suddenly there too, hands reaching into the water, trying to keep a grip on the wet rocks.
Weddellina squamulosa
Rhyncholacis crassipes
In the Amazon, many of these artefacts would not have survived, either through organic deterioration over the passing of time, or the loss of the cultural knowledge associated with them. Spruce’s writing reveals a larger world in the Amazon that could not be collected, contained and represented by a physical object – sometime the ephemeral moments and sounds that accompany daily life.
Leopoldinia piassaba and smoke surface. Brushed sandalwood soot and 12 carat gold on chromatography glass plates.
It is a challenge to view these artefacts today when they don’t belong to us culturally and their materials are not familiar in our landscape. The first categories I made after I began to work with the collection quickly unravelled as I realised the classification I imposed was tied to my own experiences, and revealed little about the complex roles the artefacts played within their indigenous source communities. My neat lists titled ‘musical instruments’, ‘ceremonial objects’, and ‘body adornment’ became as arbitrary as calling them ‘red things’ and ‘hollow things’ when I learned, for instance, how the maraca or the tobacco pipe was not simply for music or recreation but was a shaman’s tool, and how time itself could be connected to significant objects, as in the quartz brought from the Andes to be worn as a necklace – its hole drilled with sand and water over the course of months or probably years. I knew the weight and feeling of quartz from walking in the hills myself, and finding pieces shining in the river that could be picked up and held until warm and dry before being put in a pocket to travel forward on unlikely journeys. And for the seeds of Bixa orellana, the Lipstick Tree, which were new to me, I cracked open the spiky seedpods to find the tiny sticky red teeth lined up on a spine inside. Picking them out, I rubbed them between my fingers so the red paint slipped off. They fit under my nail and could be run over skin or another surface until their thin shell of paint had run out. This paint is not lightfast, and there is a satisfaction to these impermanent marks, that seemed a way to learn instinctively through touch, and be an initial manner to engage with these objects and understand their stories.
Bixa orellana.