Follow the Plants is an anthology of artworks, dialogues, roundtables, essays and scores that treats plants as companions in artistic research—tracing how they move through histories, bodies, archives and rituals, and what artists learn by following them.
About This Book
Edited by Madeleine Collie and Yvonne Billimore, the book grows out of a long-running exchange among artists in the Food Art Research Network, developed in collaboration with Finland's Bioart Society. Rather than treating plants as subject matter, it asks what happens when artists let plants set the terms—following their growing seasons, metabolic cycles and movements across territories, along with the stories and knowledge systems that gather around them.
The contributions are arranged as a kind of correspondence, putting practices from several continents into conversation, each grounded in particular places and ecologies. The result is both a record of collective research and a set of prompts for undertaking it—a book about interdependence that is itself built from exchange.
Key Features
- Artworks, dialogues, roundtables, essays and scores gathered in a single volume
- 38 contributors, including Åsa Sonjasdotter, Keg de Souza, Christian Thompson, Banu Subramaniam, Zheng Bo, Alana Hunt and Jorge Menna Barreto
- Designed by Zenobia Ahmed, with images edited by Paul Mylecharane
- Printed on Munken Polar Rough and Constellation Snow papers
What You'll Discover
- How following a plant—through seed, crop, archive or ritual—can become a method for artistic research
- Ways of thinking about collectivity and interdependence through plant–human relations
- How stories, knowledge systems and critical methodologies can be placed in dialogue rather than ranked
- Scores and prompts for undertaking collective research of your own
About the Editors
Madeleine Collie is the initiator and lead curator of Follow the Plants, which began as an experimental exchange she started in 2023 within the Food Art Research Network. Yvonne Billimore developed the project in dialogue with Collie, and together they have expanded it into this publication and a city-wide research assembly in Helsinki.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 165 × 234 mm
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789493382107
- Publisher: Onomatopee and Discipline
Perfect For: Artists and curators working with ecology and food, readers drawn to plant–human relations and multispecies thinking, and landscape designers interested in the cultural lives of plants.