Taiessa: variegata

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Taiessa, “alocasia scalprum,” 2023

felt, thread, wheat paste, found glass (Photo by Manpreet SIngh) (courtesy of the artist)

variegata, Taiessa’s ongoing body of work, offers a tangle of plant cuttings that appear to stretch their leaves toward the light in a sun-soaked greenhouse. These plants are crafted from ivory felt, an inert material intended to foil its organic counterpart. Akin to bleached bone, the specific tone of the felt nods to chimeral variegation in a plant’s leaves. This genetic mutation renders a plant unable to uniformly produce chlorophyl – and can also exponentially increase the selling price of a plant cutting.

While plant collection and propagation may seem a benign pastime, variegata points to the linkages between commercial plant collection, sustained colonial extraction, and 21st century capitalism. Modern European botany as a discipline emerged in the 18th century in tandem with the violent colonization of Indigenous communities and lands. Plants were extracted for study and classification, resulting in the erasure of Indigenous knowledges and the destruction of ecosystems. In the present, plant collection has exploded in popularity. Plant collection is often framed on social media as an aspirational act of self-care, while clippings of certain plant cultivars will sell online for hundreds of dollars. While most houseplants today are cultivated industrially (which presents its own concerns), this cycle of extraction, erasure, and the accrual of capital mirrors its colonial history.

Close inspection of variegata’s plant cuttings offers a glimpse into Taiessa’s exacting process. Each individual leaf is quilted and stitched from sheets of pressed felt – a process that bears some semblance to drawing – and subsequently fixed into stillness with wheat paste. The inevitable slowness of this process is significant. The time, care, and material intuition required resonates with the process of nurturing plants – it is also deliberately and self-reflexively asynchronous with the cadence of our current moment.  With this pointed emphasis on care, reciprocity, and moving with slowness and intention, variegata offers a pathway to imagining possible futures divested from capitalist modes of exchange.