What key moments or experiences led you to become the research-based artist and writer you are today?

In all honesty, this is a bit fuzzy. There aren’t any necessarily distinct moments that stick out. In part, my road to becoming a research-based artist and writer was very meandering. Towards the end of my BA, I was introduced to photographic historian Kelley Wilder, whose perspective on photography really interested me. From our conversations, I planned to pursue an MA in Photographic History at DMU, but circumstances changed, and I decided instead on an MA in Art History and Museum Curating with Photography at the University of Sussex. There, I encountered art theory for the first time, which, as a practitioner, was its own tricky road to navigate. What it did expose me to was how interesting, and unconventional, research could be. And that I enjoyed academic writing.

For that period, I didn’t produce much in the way of art, but I did a lot of thinking about photography and its history, particularly in relation to the production and sharing of images that depicted queer identity in Victorian England. It took three years after graduating and being told by another photography scholar, Ben Burbridge, while I was at Sussex, that practice-based PhD’s even existed. I then began to think about how I might integrate theory, research and photographic practice. And then, my PhD experience was just as meandering as the road that led me to it. What I would say has been a key motivator is an interest in my discipline’s history. The tactile, material parts of analogue photography that make it feel far more like an art or craft form than digital ever did for me. There’s something about working with historical methods in the context of modern life that provides you a sense of material connection to the past. Writing, as a corollary, gives me a way of working through these ideas. They’re the tools to dig up those unconscious motivators and pull them to the surface to observe how and why I did them. In ecological terms, it feels now like a cyclical relationship. They inform and nourish each other. 

In your statement, you mentioned being particularly interested in the concept of plant intelligence and how understanding more about individual species can narrow the human-nature divide. Could you elaborate on these theoretical approaches and how they impact your visual language?

These particular ideas grew from my research surrounding the concept of “plant-blindness” (the inability for people to “see” plants in their everyday life), which the botanists Elizabeth S. Schussler and James H. Wandersee (1990) argue can be contested through direct and consistent engagement with individual plants (or species); and the art historian Giovanni Aloi’s paper “Speculative Phytopoetics” (2021), which proposed the question of how art can disrupt capitalist strategies of vegetal objectification, particularly through developing relationships with domestic plants. In essence, the combination of the two provided me with a framework on both a personal and creative basis to understand how my relationship with oak trees as a genus, and even with specific trees that I encounter on a regular basis, might unsettle unconscious cultural attitudes that demarcate plants as “other” to the point of alienation. 

This perspective’s impact on my visual language has meant, for example, that components of the oak tree are not only a part of the photographic material, but they are also visually present. In Arboreal Encounters, the tannin creates a sepia hue that can vary in intensity and tonal range depending on how strong the extraction is. In effect, the visual language became somewhat uncontrollable. Or, that the control becomes co-authored between me and the tendrils of the oak. This is why I think of the work as a form of poetic collaboration. Audience members, or even those encountering the work online, therefore, cannot meet the work without looking at, or through, an element of the oak itself. The oak becomes, in part, the lens through which it is observed. 

In your work, you incorporate organic matter into photographic processes. How do these processes act as a form of collaboration with the plant itself, and how does this collaboration influence the final artwork's meaning?

I personally use the word “collaboration” in a poetic sense, meaning I don’t like to imply that the plants I work with are consciously interacting with me through their organic matter. This, I feel, is a perspective derived more from spiritual connections with nature which, although exists on a sort of peripheral plane, isn’t exactly where my ideas are drawn from. To me, poetic modes of collaboration draw on the material connections between myself and the trees I make work with. The fact that parts of the oak touch the surface of the paper, that they become embedded in the fibres of the print or change the way in which I make images; all of which come to be through the connection between mine and the oak’s body. In essence, works from the projects Arboreal Encounters and Organic Impressions are the result of direct encounter between my hands, the plant, and the photographic material, meaning that they don’t just depict oaks, they are also made-with them.

There’s a sense of intimacy and touch inherent in the artwork’s making that, for me, transforms the images from being purely representational into something that literary theorist Ann Garascia calls “co-authorship” (2019). In photographic theory, this interaction is described as a “photographic index” or “trace”, or the idea that photographs are a direct trace of the physical world it represents. Through working with the oak’s material for the Chthonotypes and Rhizotypes, these physical traces are not only deepened but remain visible as the images come into being through the plant’s direct encounter with photographic surfaces. 

Your practice seeks to foreground plants as "beings, rather than things." How do you translate this ontological shift into visual and material terms within your photographic work?

In short, my photographs attempt to “activate” the plant’s aliveness by their physical presence in photographic processes or materials, or the ways in which I use photography to depict the world in non-traditional forms, such as infrared. For example, my project Perceiving Phytochrome was inspired by the photoreceptor phytochrome in trees and its ability to perceive far-red light. This information is used by the tree to know when to drop or grow its leaves, but also to sense its proximity to other trees. To me, this provided an insight into the tree’s cellular and interior world, but it also made me imagine the tree as having a form of visual perception, albeit very different than ours. The next stage was to imagine how I could translate this idea into a series of photographs. I had recently come across the conceptual documentary photographer, Richard Mosse and his project “Infra”, and became interested in infrared’s ability to capture the world in a different electromagnetic field that, although invisible to the naked eye, can be made visible through photography.

Conceptually, this was a way of thinking about how I could construct an idea of arboreal sight, plunging the audience into a visual world that is more akin to the tree than it is to the human. Making us see the world through their “eyes”. It was also meant to be slightly disorienting. Assisted through the use of long-shutter speeds that capture the wind blowing through the oak’s canopy, blurring its branches and parts of its anatomy. In a technical sense, longer shutter speeds are an essential part of infrared photography due to their use of partly opaque lens filters that intentionally block out UV light to produce infrared’s characteristic, high-contrast aesthetic. In this sense, it could be said that the ontological shift is my adherence to photographic technology that attempt to work with, not against, the aliveness of the trees I work with. 

What can you tell us about your three-part project titled "These Rooted Bodies", where you worked with several oak trees across England?

In short, it is a labour of love. “These Rooted Bodies” is a holistic exploration of the English oak through images and words, history and modern day, art and science. On one hand, it charts the beginning and end of an oak tree’s life. When it’s exhibited, I often bring with me an oak sapling that sprouted in the same year I began the PhD. It was first displayed at four years old, in 2022, and is often exhibited in direct relation to the ancient trees of Arboreal Encounters. I do this deliberately to draw out their ancestorial/descendant relations. A parallel that gives visual attention to the oak tree’s massiveness of scale, both physical and temporal.

On the other hand, it charts the tree’s anatomy, from root to crown, giving specific visual attention to each component as well as explaining their importance through words and images. However, it also demonstrates an interest in the oak’s cellular make up, its outer and interior worlds. How we see vs. how it sees itself. It is poetic and scientific, theoretical and practical. It includes representations of oak trees through images, physical components of them through artefacts, and gives examples of how they might be blended. But “These Rooted Bodies” also refers to the human lives that have become connected with them, including my own. As the title can be read both with a full stop, as the beginning of a sentence, and can refer to both the oak trees independently or to human’s co-rooted lives, it was chosen to demonstrate the complexity of how trees and human nature are consistently interwoven.

How do you balance the scientific rigour of your research with the intuitive and expressive aspects of your artistic practice, and how do these two modes of inquiry inform each other?

This has probably been the most challenging part of the project, particularly as I do not come from a scientific background. A lot of my early research involved visiting exhibitions that emerged from ideas of plant intelligence entering the programming of art institutions. What I found was that most of the artists featured were re-contextualised by the curators and that relatively few of the artists shown made work in response to the agency, or intelligence, of plants. I therefore started to think that if this question was to be taken seriously, how might this impact (particularly photographic) processes and aesthetic outcomes? The balance often came with my own critical interaction with my artistic approaches, and asking if these processes really do engage seriously with ideas of plant intelligence. If I found they didn’t, I moved on to something else. If I found they did, but they required more experimentation, then I did that. In this sense, I was led by both the science and the creative practice. They were balanced because they had to work in tandem to function properly.

These then informed the central question as to how I might combine art and science, using my varied knowledge and experience in photography to ask how ideas of plant intelligence might be integrated. The camera less artist and founder of The Sustainable Darkroom, Hannah Fletcher, has spoken of her approach to projects in the past as a form of “pseudoscience” which, although isn’t a term I would necessarily apply to my own work, does contain some truth to it. What I’ve found interesting is that the visual outcomes of the project in the form of exhibition, tend to draw from certain botanical and/or scientific methods of preservation, displaying objects in glass jars, beakers, for example. This latter point is something I’ve yet to fully reflect on, but it’s an interesting aspect nonetheless, as it happened intuitively.

Can you describe a specific instance where working closely with a plant or plant species led to an unexpected discovery or shift in your understanding of its relationship to humans?

The most notable, for me, was the discovery that the British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot (1880-1887), the inventor of the salted paper and calotype processes in photography, used gallic acid, an oak tree derivative, to produce an original form of what we now call “developer”. This discovery was initially located via the research of Karel Doing, an artist, filmmaker and researcher who developed the term “phytography”, a technique that combines plants and photochemical emulsion (2017). Through his research and my own reading around Talbot’s methodology, I came to realise how important the oak tree was to both the literal and technical development of the medium. As the project was entirely focussed on oak trees, there is a depth of intensity that I’ve spent researching them. How they are photographed, by whom, why, and to what end. The discovery that the oak tree’s chemical history is in fact embedded in the history of photography was a crucial moment to foreground the tree’s significance. The fact that gallic acid has been revisited in modern day through initiatives such as The Sustainable Darkroom and the Curioso Lab, to produce more environmentally sustainable developers, re-signifies its value for the future development of photography. To the evolutionary ecologist, Monica Gagliano, this form of discovery through acute observation of plants demonstrates how plants can lead you to new knowledge that totally transforms your understanding of a given subject (2018).

What kind of dialogue or engagement do you hope to foster with viewers of your work, particularly in relation to their understanding of plant life and the human-nature divide?

My central hope is that people discover that plants are truly alive, that this encourages audiences to think of plants as animate beings that are active in our daily lives, and that this might provoke a change of perspective for the world around them. A belief of mine is that the philosophical distance placed between humans and nature at large, particularly in the Western world, provides a framework for us to treat it purely as a commodity. If that distance is re-aligned, re-negotiated, we might think twice before we cut down forests, pollute rivers, or fell nationally valued trees at the snap of a finger without regard of consequence. The Potawatomi botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, speaks of this in relation to the “grammar of animacy”, suggesting that the otherness of plants is even built into languages such as English. As art creates a form of visual language, I hope to give agency to these ideas by demonstrating how interwoven humans are with the world around them, and how such ideas can still exist and thrive in an urbanised, capitalist society. 

Art and artists play various roles in the fabric of contemporary society. How do you see artistic practices advancing sustainability and social consciousness?

I can’t speak to grand gestures or large-scale outcomes of artistic projects, particularly as my personal inclinations tend to be on the more subtle side. I do, however, advocate on behalf of soft activism, and like to think that work like mine can encourage audiences to think of new ways of interacting and encountering the world around them. As I’ve mentioned before, the work being done by initiatives such as The Sustainable Darkroom, Curioso Lab, the Agora School of Experimentation and the Alternative Processes School, all signify a cultural movement of photography towards a more sustainably, ecologically and socially conscious enterprise. Of course, this movement speaks mainly to different forms of artistic processes and creative motivations, however, it is underpinned by serious philosophical, political, social and cultural concerns about the climate and photography’s contribution to toxicity, pollution and waste. It is within these initiatives and individuals who are experimenting in the medium that I see real change happening.

What message or call to action would you like to share with our readers?

Making-with plants is, of course, not a practice exclusive to photography. New forms of engagement with plants that draw from their medium’s history, or instead look to their future, are all emerging rapidly. My call to action would be to seek out plants that speak to you and learn about them. Incorporate them into your paintings, drawings, films, poems and installations. Let them teach you and help them find new audiences. Put on exhibitions, organise events, and foster your own reciprocal ecosystems that nourish you as you nourish them. These, I hope, can provide enriching foundations that may also encourage forms of rewilding to grow outside the boundaries of ecology, to root instead in our psyche; to rewild the mind.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image

Big Belly Oak, Savernake Forest, Wiltshire. Arboreal Encounters, 2024 by Epha J. Roe.

All images courtesy of Epha J. Roe.