Life Cycle of a Common Weed (2009)
Exhibition View: “And Things of That Nature”
A plant-human exchange of sustenance with blood & dandelions.
About Life Cycle of a Common Weed
Lush gardens sprouted with the blood of slain beasts appear in the Talmud and in twelfth-century Persian poetry. The blood of mortal wounds from protagonists of ancient Greek tales gave rise to hyacinths, violets, and crocuses, as well as mythological plants, such as the prometheion and the moly. I am enamored of blood as a substance and as a symbol of vitality. But as I am a lifelong carrier of the hepatitis C virus, my own blood carries with it the sinister potential of seeding another person with disease. I was intrigued that my own blood—hazardous to humans—could nonetheless be useful to plants.
This nugget of horticultural information lay dormant until the concept for an artwork germinated years later: Life Cycle of a Common Weed. The idea is to stage an encounter between plants and humans involving the exchange of nutrients. Blood from a human body nourishes dandelions with nitrogen. In turn, the root and leaves of the dandelion provide nutritious and medicinal sustenance to the human. The artwork exists as a performance, visual documents, an event, and a perpetual cultivation.
