‘Photographic Phytography: Towards a Photographic Re-centring of the Plant within Theory, Material and Practice’
2024
This paper was written and published as part of Plant Perspectives, a journal of interdisciplinary plant studies. In it, I explore my practice-based research project Arboreal Encounters, a collection of tannin toned cyanotypes made with six heritage oak trees that form an element of my part-time, practice-based PhD at the University of Brighton, UK. It comprises of a brief history and background of the project before exploring how photographic practice might interact with and integrate notions of vegetal intelligence within artistic practice. By thinking of the production of Arboreal Encounters as if invitations to the trees to become part of the process of their own representation, I consider how such interactions might act symbolically as human-plant collaborations and how methods of thinking, as well as doing, may resist notions of the plant as commodity within artistic practice.
‘Qu(e)ercus robur: Orlando and the Oak Tree’
2024
This paper was written and published as part of Antennae: A Journal of Nature in Visual Culture’s 63rd issue under the theme of ‘Queering Nature’. In it, I examine the presence of an oak tree within Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, through the lens of queer ecology (a body of theory that means to understand nature, biology and sexuality without the presumption of heterosexuality as an ‘objective standard’). I argue that Woolf’s positioning of the natural world can be read as an example of queer ecological frameworks that reveal and consider not just the queer nature of the novel, but indeed the queerness of nature within it.
‘Queer Constellations: Reflections on Curatorial and Creative Practice at the Museum of English Rural Life’
2023
This paper was co-written with queer theorist Joe Jukes and published in Networking Knowledge: MeCCSA Journal for Postgraduate Research’s ‘Dreaming of Another Place’ issue. Drawing from our independent disciplines of queer theory and photographic practice, this paper examines the creative and curatorial practices, and the theoretical frameworks that structure them, in relation to Queer Constellations: Artistic Trespass and Rural Gay Histories, an art exhibition that took place at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) between July and September 2021. As the exhibition inhabited a museum whose focus is grounded in the practices and culture of agricultural life, our paper explores themes of ‘dis-orientation’ as a form that queerness takes within such spaces, asking the question: is there queerness in rural life? This is then reflected upon through my own photographic practice, asking how photographs can function as a form of blending of worlds.
Image taken from the on-going series ‘Queer in the Country’ by Felix Pilgrim.