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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Plant Worlds - Anti-Plant Blindness: Cherry Blossoms

By Natalie Cheung (z5020266) and Simonn Nguyen (z5112723)

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Tension and Hybridity - An Eco-Complex Investigation - By Eva Caley

When reading through the living book, the first real connection I made was between the marginal world’s close reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the plant world's video, by Simon and Natalie, about plant blindness. There seemed a similar impulse in the two of them to investigate what it might be to consider the ecosphere in a holistic way. In the video, Simon and Natalie are urging us to see cherry blossom trees in all their complex symbolism to humanity. They discuss how cherry blossoms have historically been used in both love songs and war songs, to represent Japan as a country as its national flower, and to represent Japanese patriotism. The mode of representation even flips when they discuss how, instead of using the cherry blossom as a symbol to represent something, the sakura sakura song is used to represent the blooming of cherry blossoms in spring. There is, therefore, a complexity to the cherry blossom’s position within human discourse.

The marginal worlds group’s close reading is, essentially, expanding on the deconstructionist idea of plant-blindness to include non-living things. By investigating the furniture in To the Lighthouse, they engage in how the ecosphere around humanity can play a role in structuring an ecosystem dynamically, rather than passively as the standard narrative of environment says. They also introduce an idea of a discourse, or a tension, here. The same tension, of blossoms representing themselves and other things, and being represented by man-made things, seems to occur in To the Lighthouse. The key difference however, is that rather than acting as passive symbols, as the cherry blossom does in Simon and Natalie’s video, Woolf works to allow furniture “to structure and restructure humanity’s place in the ecosphere”. The furniture in the work is made by things derived from natural materials, and they are man-made, but they act as an element of the environment to evoke disintegration and hold emotion, particularly when the country is at war. What they call “the material mirroring and mimicking human emotion” is a two way dynamic, and occurs in Simon and Natalie’s video too.

This interplay between human and non-human, living and non-living, reminded me of the hybridity evoked by the animal worlds cluster, in their photo-essay on the chimera. At first this seems a bit of an odd leap, but there seemed an interesting power dynamic at play that mirrored these tensions between human, plant and non-living environmental elements. The tensions in the chimera photo essay, however, seemed to result not in a mutual shaping of action and identity as occurs in relationships between plants and non-living things and humans; instead, is results in a merging of human and non-human, or a merging of animals.

At what point does one call the hybrid mouse-rats a new thing? Same with pig heart (is it a human heart if it’s grown inside a pig?) and the Piccinini sculpture (this must, surely, be called a new thing). It seems that when the boarders between things are less able to be delineated, such as between animals, the tensions result in an uncanny blurring of existence, a hybrid being and a new being all in one.

This tension between boundaries seems to reach its peak in the striking images from Amelia and Bridget’s film, where they have taken ice in the shape of hands and placed them in nature to let them melt. This work recalls a local artist from my hometown, Townsville, who made sculptures out of ice and then placed them outside in the North Queensland heat. As they melted they made new shapes, and their form changed like the hands in the video. At what point to we delineate between these things as a sculpture, or as a hand? As ice? As water? At what point does it stop being a man-made thing, and simply become a thing in the landscape. The hybridity of the previous examples makes me wonder if these attributes are mutually exclusive.

Therefore, my last link takes us back to the work Ella and I produced over the first 9 weeks of semester. We developed the term eco-complex in order to discuss exactly these tensions between representation and actuality, and between all elements of the ecosphere, not just humanity and nature. There is an emphasis in eco-complex work on understanding nature symbols in human narratives, something I have focused on in my major creative work, and also an attempt to understand nature’s ability to exist beyond the binary, in a way that allows everything to be both things, all things, and one thing simultaneously.

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