RETURN TO RECENT WORKS
The Sower’s daughter, 2021
Details
The Sower’s Daughter, Dig
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Rake
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Sow
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Riddle
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Water
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Weed
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Pull
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Ripple
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
The Sower’s Daughter, Winnow
2021
Motion-captured 3D visualization
3 minutes, looped
CGI by John Butler
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 Sower’s Daughter is the last room in the exhibition, presenting digital works on 7 screens, each of which is a motion-captured re-enactment of the processes involved in growing the crop of flax present throughout the exhibition. The work reprises the water-colour stills in the series The Flax Sower in room 1 and their accompanying texts , continuing the provocation of the Sower’s Daughters Guide by Grace Borland Sinclair, which imagines a future when embodied knowledge of plant cultivation and husbandry that we now take for granted, is lost and may only be able to be conveyed through digital means.
Borland is interested in the handing down of knowledge through maternal lineage. In relation to flax, which was historically grown and processed by women, she considers how the knowledge, processes and movements of growing and harvesting would have been handed from mother to daughter. The titles ‘The Sower’ and the ‘Sower’s Daughter’ appear several times through the exhibition. The artist’s daughters (at home during COVID) helped to grow and harvest the flax, one of her daughters has written text that is part of the exhibition and the publication. This is a focus in the final installation of the exhibition which consists of 9 screens presenting coinciding 3-minute films called, respectively, ‘The Sowers Daughter: Dig: Rake: Sow: Riddle: Water: Weed: Pull: Ripple: Winnow’. The films begin as abstract, almost sparkling, constellations of light that gradually take the form of a body in movement. The room hosts a strange choreographed dance of avatars. These moving figures are generated from the movements of planting, growing and harvesting the flax. The strange and beautiful installation poignantly touches on the historic (fields of women collectively making these movements), the personal (the figure filmed was the artist herself who learned these movements through her own growing), the future (the artist proposes the possibility of a digital avatar as way to hand on knowledge, implied by the title).
From ‘And the sun shone down on the flax’ Christine Borland’s ‘In Relation to Linum’ by Kirsty Lorenz, Doris, 14 September 2021