Botanical Art / Citation / Gifting: Sites of Irresolvable Complexity
Storm Greenwood (she/her) is a queer artist-scholar and AHRC-funded doctoral candidate pursuing her PhD at the intersection of Fine Art, Plant Humanities and Queer Decolonial Feminist Studies at Glasgow School of Art. Her research praxis includes writing, painting and embroidery. She is currently working on a series of illuminated manuscripts featuring botanical paintings entangled with citations from queer (and) decolonial (and) feminist texts.
Through an accumulation of scholarly and artistic work, Storm’s thesis proposes flowers as ideal companions in asking complex questions about how to live with the capitalist heteropatriarchal colonial legacy of the British Empire. One strand of Storm’s work is her ‘devotional citation’ praxis in which she gifts artworks featuring citations from scholarly texts back to the scholars who wrote them. Storm has made gift artworks for scholars such as Jennifer C. Nash, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Amber Jamilla Musser, Ashon T. Crawley and Emma Dabiri.
Several of the artworks on display featured Storm’s own words and form part of a personal narrative woven through the thesis, while the fresh flowers were arranged in jugs and vases to honour flowers as companions and collaborators. The flowers were all seasonal at the time of the presentation in June; peonies, viburnums, stocks, clematis and freesias.
Sustainability is an integral aspect of Storm’s research and the artworks on display were painted on cotton rag paper which she hand dyed with Japanese Indigo leaves (green), Madder roots (pink) and Coreopsis flowers (yellow).
The display featured citations from the following texts: Sarah Jane Cervenak, Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life, 2021. Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next, 2021. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, 1997. Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, 2013. jennifer c. nash, Practising Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality, 2011. Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, 2018. Ocean Vuong interviewed by Madison Darbyshire, 2022.
Alongside her PhD research, Flavia works part-time as a scriptwriter.
CONNECT WITH STORM
E-mail: s.greenwood1@student.gsa.ac.uk
Instagram: @stormgreenwood