RETURN TO RECENT WORKS

The Flax Sower’s Guide, 2021

Details

The Flax Sower’s Guide
3-part digital inkjet print on flax tow paper

The Sower’s Daughters Guide
By Grace Borland Sinclair
3-part digital inkjet print on flax tow paper

Photography: Keith Hunter

Links

Art Lates - 2 (at 44 mins)
Patricia Fleming Projects
Botanics
Doris Press Review
Hyperallergic Review
Map Magazine Review

 

DESCRIPTION

An exhibition of new works exploring the lifecycle of flax (Linum usitatissimum) and considering the symbiotic nature of its nurture, evolving the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s 350-year relationship with the plant.

Spun flax fibres produce linen, one of the most ancient forms of textile. Prized too for its seeds’ medicinal properties, flax featured in Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis, the first catalogue of a plant collection in Scotland, which listed 3,000 plants growing at Edinburgh’s Physic Garden in 1670 – later to become RBGE. In 2021, Borland planted flax at RBGE, continuing the contemporary and historical cycles embedded in this project. In Relation to Linum is an intimate reconnection with the ecological heritage and future of growing and making practices, and their associations with care.

Extract from RBGE Guide

The Flax Sower’s Guide & The Sower’s Daughters Guide are encountered early in the exhibition; The Flax Sower’s Guide describes the cycles and processes involved in the artists first experience of growing flax from seed at home in 2019. Each stage in the process is mirrored by a water-colour in the series The Flax Sower, on the gallery wall opposite. The Sower’s Daughters Guide was written as a speculative, fictional response by the artist’s daughter Grace Borland Sinclair, imagining a future when knowledge of plant cultivation and husbandry that we now take for granted, is lost.

The Flax Sower’s Guide

DIG: it starts with one line of string laid out in my front garden, in early spring. Further lines radiate from the centre to make six segments. Cutting down with the spade, I shuffle around clockwise, joining the outer point of each string to make one continuous circular brown slit in the grass. And then I dig. RAKE: the small amount of soil underneath the turf is poor because the garden is still really part of the rocky beach across the road. I wheelbarrow in dark brown topsoil, and rake it together with some compost until I think I have a seed-bed of ‘fine tilth’. SOW: Mother’s Day, 31st March 2019 - one daughter weighs enough of the silky brown seeds to make a dense planting of 2000 plants per square meter. The family line up and I make us rehearse until we can sow our allocated section of seeds in a smooth, circular choreography. RIDDLE: everyone stands on the turf perimeter watching me walk from the outside to the centre of the circle, riddling the finest of soil over the seeds, which I can clearly see sitting on the surface. I don’t mention it, but worry they are not evenly distributed. WATER: flax seedlings are ‘frost tolerant’ and they begin to emerge on April 16th after sleet and snow. I pull one up; the strong branching root makes up two-thirds of the plant. Next day the hottest recorded spell of April weather begins. I hadn’t anticipated this, but I water every second day, using 24 watering cans each time. WEED: there are many vigorous weeds, most of which are new in my garden so probably arrived in the topsoil. I look them up as I go and nearly all have associations with traditional medicine - Plantain; leaves in poultice used for sores, blisters, swellings, and insect stings. The physiotherapist I see for my sore shoulder says she recommends all her middle-aged female patients take two table-spoons of ground flax seeds a day to replace oestrogen’s anti-inflammatory properties. PULL: in late June the first fragile blue flowers open, each lasts a day before fading to form a seed-head. On a sunny morning 116 days after sowing, when most of the seed heads have yellowed, I pull the flax. Working from the outside of the circle, I gather a bunch with my right hand and pull up with my left, repeating until I can’t comfortably hold anymore. At the end of the day the circle is edged by 60 bundles of flax. Over the next month they turn the colour of straw as they dry out. RIPPLE: my eldest daughter works with me to remove the seeds; she wears a shocking pink silk skirt. We put the seed-pod ends of the bunches into pillow-cases and use our weight to crush them with rolling pins, marvelling at the thousands of seeds among the debris that we empty out.

The Sower’s Daughters Guide

by Grace Borland Sinclair

WINNOW: A perfect sunny, windy late autumn day to remove the dried debris of the crushed outer seed-pods. Taking a handful in my right hand, I slowly let it trickle into my left, the broken yellow husks fall to the cloth on the ground – I’m collecting them for the compost – leaving the shiny, perfect brown seeds in my left hand. WINNOW: Hands feel for invisible intricacies. Unknown textures and remote familiarities. Fractal. Fibrous. Skin puckers with the evocation of misplaced memory. Mumpsimus. An air not artificial but alive. Alive used to have an opposite, what was it? RIPPLE: Separation. Everything was once not whole. Instinctive, a strange pounding from within. Something is emerging. Dormant sensations stir, dwams distil. Pummel. Pound. Small, invaluable. Can’t let it get away. PULL: Eyes turn towards the ground, hands open upwards. Palms crack. The cleaving of chronology. What was once pure transforms. Now worn, adept. Fingers grasp at unseen shapes, feet trace a circular pattern. Vital signs oscillate. WEED: Remove the bad, preserve the good. ‘Weed: a plant that causes ecological damage’. A flash. The last vestiges of flora. The opposite of alive returns, stronger now. A bitter taste on the tongue. Stomach churns. To protect is to destroy. WATER: A new sound, a light in the vast expanse of space. Transparent, tasteless, odourless, colourless. No, not colourless. Particles swirl to make green. Droplets of memory, a hand pulls back a curtain. Blurred spectres flicker across the ether. A dry globe in reverse. Empty chasms fill with sustenance. Concrete cracks, a force pushes back against gravity. The ignition of the inevitable. RIDDLE: Eyes open to a deluge of dirt. The earth’s mouth gulps greedily. Submerged, sunken, entombed, enshrouded. For days there will be silence. Unseen hands of long-awaited verdure move beneath the surface. Subterranean whispers. Waiting patiently to be born again. SOW: Figures flicker, bent and silent. Faces blurred, they move in patterns. Rise, step, crouch. Rise, step, crouch. Transmissible momentum. Fata Morgana, a facsimile of generations long past. RAKE: A world comes into focus. Grey sky, a biting wind, the rich smell of petrichor. Intimacy creeps, the figures sharpen. A wooden handle manifests. Smooth, sturdy, imbued with purpose. Lines in the earth form a pathway into a past. The past. My past. Memento mori, the opposite of alive. DIG: The warmth of genesis. Inception radiates. An organic rhythm thumps beneath the surface. Pale flesh flushes with crimson. Saturation bursts. A womb of open terra. Seductive, bewitching. Calloused hands clutch and cradle, rough cloth absorbs beads of salt. Straining together, breathing as one. Distance evaporates. Faces turn, heads beckon. Lips sculpt words in the frosty air. Primogenitor, ancestor, mother.