Under Pressure: Botanical Hauntings
Shadow crops
Etching, monotype, engraving
Written from a farm in the Eastern Cape, my great-grandfather writes to his son about the many crops he is trying to grow on the recalcitrant land. Grapefruit, pumpkins and lucerne are amongst the crops he names, plants that would not have been of much interest to the European botanists who looked for more exotic species to collect and re(name). By creating copper etchings of these familiar plants in the accepted scientific style along with their Latin, Linnean nomenclature, the local and known is made alien, contrasting with the embodied daily rituals of farming.