#wildproject

Five of my Invasive Pigments drawings are in Portland right now, at a show celebrating five years of the excellent organization Signal Fire, with whom I did a residency in the summer of 2010. I've just finished packing a new crop of seven pieces for the upcoming Wave Hill exhibition Drawn to Nature:

The newest pieces are a plexiglass case for displaying 16 of the pigments and a color wheel based on the origins of each pigment:

(thanks to Flickr users clspeace, treegrow, esagor, Esteve.Conaway and klm185, who provided Creative Commons licensed photos for this piece when the plants were out of season in my neighborhood!)

I'm on Spring Break this week, and after I send my work off to Wave Hill tomorrow morning, much of the remainder of the break will be spent on research and writing. I'm working on an article based on my Invasive Pigments project for an upcoming issue of wildproject, a journal that will be published in English for the first time this year (the previous twelve issues have been in French). As the editors describe it: "From natural to human sciences, urbanism to contemporary art, wildproject is a journal of environmental studies grounded in environmental philosophy."  

I submitted an abstract to their call for papers on the theme Broadway Transect back in October, proposing to explore "the migration and proliferation of certain plants in tandem with dense human populations". I'm looking specifically at those plants with which I've become very familiar through the pigment-making process and which also grow along Broadway at some point in its 33 mile stretch from Wall Street to Yonkers.  I've been wandering along Broadway periodically throughout the winter months, snapping occasional plant photographs, but I'm looking forward to doing a more thorough urban hike now that some of the spring plants and flowers are (just) beginning to show themselves. Below, the hardy winter annual common chickweed, sprawling out of a crack at the base of the rock wall around Trinity Cemetery, Broadway and 155th (cigarette butt for scale!).