2026
Textile (fabric dye on canvas), Installation
Using natural dyes and fragmentary assemblage, the textile works function as unstable herbaria of an imagined homeland. A herbarium is a practice of preserving plants by pressing and classifying them, removing them from their natural environment in order to stabilise and archive them. It promises preservation, the possibility of holding what is fragile in place. Yet extinction and diaspora complicate this promise. The textile works become a record of a plant that cannot be fully held in place, whether geographically, ecologically, or emotionally.
The Crown Imperial flower has become increasingly rare in parts of its natural habitat due to environmental change and human intervention. Through cultivation, trade, and botanical relocation, plants reappear elsewhere, in gardens, archives, and domestic spaces, continuing to circulate even as their original landscapes diminish or change.