In the words of Connie Zheng, seeds hold the past and the future. This month's episode features interviews with Jessamine Finch and Connie Zheng who each engage with the way seeds are shared and dispersed. Jessamine speaks about her interest in the science of the natural world, and work with saving and sharing seeds, most recently on the eastern coast of the US. Then Chris speaks to Connie Zheng an artist whose work is influenced by the metaphorical significance of seeds.
Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (also known as Oakland, California). She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her projects frequently include participatory scenarios and seek to diagram dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, as well as the interplay between memory, culture, and place. Projects such as maps of toxic sites and environmental remediation, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making kits, mooncake design workshops and improvisational pseudo-documentaries are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, the continued weight of history, and possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing and future ecological transformations.
Her projects have been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Salt Beyoğlu (Istanbul, Turkey), and her work is held in the collections of the
Kadist Foundation and the
David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. In 2021 she published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her essays have appeared in The Back Room at Small Press Traffic, SFMOMA’s Open Space and Errant Journal. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a
PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California — Santa Cruz.
Jessamine Finch is a botanist and seed ecologist working in plant conservation. She has held positions at Framingham State University, Native Plant Trust, and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Jessamine holds a PhD in Plant Biology and Conservation from Northwestern University, and was the 2022 Plant Conservation Biology Fellow at Oak Spring.
Host: Chris Stafford
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