Naturally dyed fiber with rabbit brush, cotton rope, New Mexico native wildflower seeds, soil, mycorrhizal fungi spores

(dimensions variable)

A seed is a container of pure potential. Though inanimate in its sleepy seed state, its fullest and most realized state is as an animate being in the world. It takes a radical moment for the seed to make its transformation into the living realm, especially in the desert. The seed knows when the conditions are right, and when that time comes it alchemically transforms its identity. The seed breaks open and goes through a tremendous morphological shift, and at this time the seed is no longer a seed. It threshes off its hull and is born into a radicle – the plant embryo. It begins to simultaneously grow upward and downward, reaching both towards the light and towards the darkness.

“Radicle” is made to place viewers underground, underneath the mycorrhizal network made of rope where a multiplicity of “seeds” wait for the right moment. Each hanging pod represents a sleeping seed, and is filled with high desert native wildflowers and soil. The outside of the pods are dyed with rabbit brush harvested on site. Viewers were invited to cut or untie a pod from the woven network to take home and collaborate, as a reminder that we are all a part of the ecosystem. The pod contained all of the nutrients and content needed in order to grow – but those contents needed to be spread and gently tended.