material
This is a meditation on memory, ritual and temporality through an ongoing entanglement with jasmine plants and flowers. The project is presented through photographs, performances and video in addition to the objects themselves which function as sculptural markers, memories and punctuations in time.
Statement
For at least the last five years, I have been collecting jasmine flowers from plants I grow at my house. I used to pick the jasmine flowers and put them on the kitchen counter so I could smell their familiar, yet beguiling aroma. Their fragrance elicited many fond memories of summers in India and transported me,
just for a second, back there and back to a feeling of home.
After the flowers dried, I always put them in a drawer in my kitchen and left them there. It became a sort of emergent ritual. However, when I began reading the writings of post-human/new materialist scholars, I started to think about my jasmine flower ritual differently. I examined this ritual as a consideration of agential forces, and I saw an opportunity to explore issues of agency and materiality. Instead of treating the act of collecting dried jasmine flowers as a separate or discrete action, I attempted to take stock of it through my artmaking practice. More broadly, I wondered whether matter, things and other nonhuman entities (like time and space) could be considered active agents in the artmaking process.
This jasmine-based facet of my artmaking practice not only presents various collections of jasmine flowers, but it has also become the matter through which I remember and mark the passage of time. The titles and descriptions of these various collections list various lengths of time instead of relying on
the hours or days, I list seemingly random collections of time to mark the irregularity of when jasmine flowers bloom. These are the days and times I was able to travel back in time to my memories of India. Working with this homemade ritual allowed me to take stock of the human and nonhuman entities
entangled through my artmaking practice.
For at least the last five years, I have been collecting jasmine flowers from plants I grow at my house. I used to pick the jasmine flowers and put them on the kitchen counter so I could smell their familiar, yet beguiling aroma. Their fragrance elicited many fond memories of summers in India and transported me,
just for a second, back there and back to a feeling of home.
After the flowers dried, I always put them in a drawer in my kitchen and left them there. It became a sort of emergent ritual. However, when I began reading the writings of post-human/new materialist scholars, I started to think about my jasmine flower ritual differently. I examined this ritual as a consideration of agential forces, and I saw an opportunity to explore issues of agency and materiality. Instead of treating the act of collecting dried jasmine flowers as a separate or discrete action, I attempted to take stock of it through my artmaking practice. More broadly, I wondered whether matter, things and other nonhuman entities (like time and space) could be considered active agents in the artmaking process.
This jasmine-based facet of my artmaking practice not only presents various collections of jasmine flowers, but it has also become the matter through which I remember and mark the passage of time. The titles and descriptions of these various collections list various lengths of time instead of relying on
the hours or days, I list seemingly random collections of time to mark the irregularity of when jasmine flowers bloom. These are the days and times I was able to travel back in time to my memories of India. Working with this homemade ritual allowed me to take stock of the human and nonhuman entities
entangled through my artmaking practice.
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