A Generous Yield Text by Dominique Edwards Gina van der Ploeg Exhibition 27 January - 10 February 2024
The phrase, a generous yield, speaks to the harvest of plenty, the promise of a good year - joyful in our knowing that the foreseeable future has been provided for, that we might suffer less. Somewhere, in there, once long ago – was a deity of sorts who represented the harvest, the heavens, and the birth of all things. The very essence of life. Something unknown, something hopeful – perhaps even terrifying. Gina van der Ploeg works with the bodies of plants. She gathers willow, harvests flax, drags the river for mounds of water-hyacinth and returns home with her haul where it is dried and might be mulched, pulped, spun, threaded or woven. Here, the atmosphere is an entity of its own, a warm embrace dense with fine particles shed from an assortment of transformed plant bodies. Making linen involves a process that starts with flax seed, sowed in early spring, watered regularly and harvested anything between ninety to a hundred days later. Alternatively, thirty days or so after the appearance of their delicate blue flowers. Gina grows her flax on the pavement outside her childhood home. To the uninformed observer, this patch of flax might look like a lush pocket of tall grass. Transforming this material into linen involves harvesting the flax – pulling the entire plant from the soil and processing it by rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, hackling and eventually, spinning. The material extracted through this undertaking, prior to
being spun, is a long, fine, hair-like fibre. This is slow work, bound to the life cycles of plant material and the specific properties their bodies yield, work that involves extensive labour. The transformation of plant material into rope, thread and cloth is an activity human beings have been involved with for as long as can be remembered. A making-tradition embedded in myth and folklore, connected to the soil, the sun and the sky, the spider and the umbilical cord. A technology presenting a particular kind of knowledge, sense-making and understanding, that through its evolution over thousands of years brings us from the seemingly simple stem of a plant, to the Jacquard loom and eventually, the digital neural networks that have become an integral part of our existence. One could argue that ‘we are of plant,’ our predominant fuel, food, the air we breathe and historically the structures we have built all relate in some way to the realm of plant. Botanists dedicated to exploring the development of life on earth would point toward lichen and in particular, fungi - with their extensive mycelial networks, essential to all plantlife and argue instead: ‘we are of fungi.’ Our communion with the soil, regardless of how one might contextualise it, is prophetic, connected to our bodies and involves complex sets of relationships with organisms other than human, and value systems we are yet to comprehend.