The Spirare series explores interdependencies between plants, animals, and fungi. The foundation of each image is a botanical photogram, rendered in cyanotype, the alternative photographic process used by botanist Anna Atkins in 1843 to make the first, ever, photographic book. Over the cyanotype, I add paint, ink, collage, and sometimes, mushroom spores. Each image in the series depicts native New England flora that I grow or forage, plus opportunistic plants. I prefer the word opportunistic to invasive when I describe plants that exist within a landscape due to human intervention and that, anthropologist Natasha Myers notes, “teach us about the ravages of colonialism.” Opportunistic plants alter flora and ecosystems not with malice, but to live. Sometimes their interactions with indigenous plants are harmonious; other times those interactions are fraught. Photosynthesizers appear life-sized in this series whose title is inspired by Myers’ suggestion that s we (humans) “learn not just how to collaborate, but also how to conspire with the plants, to breathe with them. Remember, they breathed us into being.” Birds sometimes appear in an image; they sing and fly, if in alarmingly reduced numbers, year after year, as they have since the Jurassic Period. The work literally depicts plants and birds, but more figuratively reflects our entangled dependence with a rapidly changing environment, and the opportunities for transformation that change offers.
