FESTIVAL/NEW/WORKS
Care and Cultivation
2023
Care and Cultivation is a collaborative work between Natori and Courtney that highlights the angel's trumpet and the okra plant’s intimate relationships with humans. Both plants have traveled the world and the ages in the hands of people who cultivated the plant for their own express care and cultivation.
Kidnapped and enslaved Africans brought okra seeds to the Americas and cultivated them to ensure a familiar food supply. Angel’s Trumpet is thought to have been cultivated by peoples of South and Central America for beauty and medicinal purposes for so long, that many species of it are considered “extinct in the wild,” evolved to no longer make seeds but to rely on humans for perpetuation via cuttings.
Courtney recorded okra flowers blooming in early morning hours and the angel’s trumpet flowers in the evenings with time lapse photography to create the projections. Natori made knit panels on a vintage knitting machine, creating intentional gaps for the flowers to pass through.
Courtney and Natori bundle-dyed the knits using a collection of dried and foraged Coreopsis flowers. Mercerized cotton yarn was purposely chosen for its compatibility with the coreopsis flowers during the dying process. Cotton and okra are both from the mallow plant family.
These artworks uphold the vegetal world as partners with the human world in the care of the earth.
“Care and Cultivation” includes
Care and Cultivation, 2021-2023
HD video projection, Raspberry Pi and custom software, silent
Dimensions variable
Ed 1⁄3
Ravel, 2023
By Natori Green and Courtney Egan
Handmade cotton fiber panels knitted on a manual knitting machine, wood
branches, HD video projection, silent, 120” x 50” x 10”, 2023.
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