9 Seed at the Table
9
Domestic Dialogues Group Show
@ Terrace Collective, 187 Deptford High Street, London
Seed at the table is a site-specific installation that reflects on Deptford’s context and 600-year history as a British center of seafaring and trade, conquest and migration.
This is a continuation of Isabel’s interest in exploring land and landscape as a medium to discover traces of history – particularly its spontaneous plant life, otherwise known as ‘weeds’, as possible unruly, authorless archives of human stories, action and movement.
Over the late summer months of 2024, this work began with exploring the land that we stand on at 187 Deptford High Street. Despite the interior space being officially uninhabited for almost a decade, the property’s back garden had become inhabited with large swathes of plants. Of 24 species identified, 7 were classified as introduced to the UK: Annual Mercury, Canadian Horseweed, Indian Woodsorrel, Water Beard Grass, Butterfly Bush, Peruvian Daisy and Weedy Hawksbeard. Some intentional, some accidental, each species held its own rich story of its origin and introduction.
A French botanist-missionary in China in the 1890s, sending Butterfly Bush seeds to a French nursery for commercial cultivation in Europe… Canadian Horseweed first recorded in London in 1690, pointing to unintentional introduction through early shipping activities with North America… Archaeobotanical evidence suggesting Indian Woodsorrel’s spread through trade routes to South-East Asia before the 1400s…
This installation imagines these ‘weeds’ brought from the outside into an interior space, a home, perhaps their home. Seven soft sculptures gather around a dining table. They are colored with dye made from each plant, and reference the shape of each plant’s seeds – enlarged, taking up space, part capsule of information, part limb.
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Plant pigments, cotton fabric, cotton thread, etchings on found objects, secondhand furniture.