Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in a series on Arts-Based Research in the Anthropocene edited by Amrita DasGupta
Author’s Note: Botanical gardens have a history of colonization at their foundation connected to resource extraction, knowledge appropriation, and the global transfer of economic plants. Modern botanical gardens are beginning to address this history in regards to attracting diverse audiences, but do not always acknowledge how the construction of nature and collections continues to support structures, ideologies, and practices of Western colonialism in contemporary botanical knowledge production. My research-creation thesis will produce visual art that intervenes in these discourses by complicating Western botanical history and visibilizing the entanglements in historical and contemporary scientific products such as herbaria, botanical illustration, and living plant collections. The objective is to make visible these Eurocentric narratives, not only around the history of plant and environmental sciences, but also in contemporary botanical garden narratives. Arts-based research methodologies aid by refusing the disembodied and generalizing perspective of the Anthropocene and committing to an acknowledgement of the artist-researcher’s relationality to others.
“I packed my backpack and took the metro to the Jardin Botanique de Montréal on a sunny afternoon, Saturday before Thanksgiving. I spoke with the horticultural desk to receive a laminated collections map of the arboretum: I had a cool idea for a project involving Taxodium, a species of tree that grows in swampy areas and has protruding ‘knees’ that act as gaseous exchange root adaptations. Following the directions of the horticultural volunteers, I reached where the Taxodium (cypress) was to be, only to be met with a large planting of Taxus (yew) shrubs instead.”
![Image 1: Packing lists and Taxus sp.
[The image is two pages in a sketchbook. The artist has used a brush pen in black ink. On the left page is a self portrait of the artist and a list of the clothes she wore, as well as drawings of the contents of her backpack including snacks, socks, pens, etc. The date on the bottom left page is 2019/10/12. On the right page is sketch representing a map of the botanical gardens, with an expanded circle that zooms in to demonstrate how the species are separated and assigned by Latin name. Further down the page are sketches of the difference between Taxodium (cypress) and Taxus (yew). The Taxodium/cypress is a tree form conifer that is distinguished by woody nodules rising from the roots, also known as ‘knees’. The Taxus/yew is more of a woody shrub in hedge form, evergreen, with small fruits. Across both pages of sketches there are notes printed that describe or caption the artist’s actions, decisions, or thought processes.]
Image by author.](https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Tracy_Image-1-Cropped-1.png?resize=970%2C723&ssl=1)
[The image is two pages in a sketchbook. The artist has used a brush pen in black ink. On the left page is a self portrait of the artist and a list of the clothes she wore, as well as drawings of the contents of her backpack including snacks, socks, pens, etc. The date on the bottom left page is 2019/10/12. On the right page is sketch representing a map of the botanical gardens, with an expanded circle that zooms in to demonstrate how the species are separated and assigned by Latin name. Further down the page are sketches of the difference between Taxodium (cypress) and Taxus (yew). The Taxodium/cypress is a tree form conifer that is distinguished by woody nodules rising from the roots, also known as ‘knees’. The Taxus/yew is more of a woody shrub in hedge form, evergreen, with small fruits. Across both pages of sketches there are notes printed that describe or caption the artist’s actions, decisions, or thought processes.]
Image by author.
The above text was written in reflection after an observational sketching session at the botanical gardens. This was an exercise in arts-based inquiry for me, and a precursor to developing my thesis proposal on decoloniality and botanical gardens. What began as an assignment on arts- based research methodologies expanded into a performative and visual autoethnography, as my recorded observations led to a critically reflexive engagement on my relationships with drawing, with research, with gardens, with trees, with colonial systems of botany, and the undefinable emotional baggage of growing up in two cultures.
Arts-Based Research and Epistemic Disobedience
Arts-based research, also known as research-creation in Canada, is an approach that combines creative and academic research practices where the creative process is grounded in the research activity and produces media/art forms that are critically informed by the research itself (Government of Canada, 2012). This can be done in many ways: my toolbox includes visual art techniques, archival research, site-specific observational sketching, and frameworks of coloniality/decoloniality and “epistemic disobedience.”1 My thesis positions botanical gardens in relation to coloniality, which posits that despite living in a supposed post- colonial timeframe, the dual nature of coloniality/modernity continues to support the structures, ideologies, and practices of Western colonialism in modern botanical knowledge production.2
Walter Mignolo’s “epistemic disobedience” encourages the identification and subversion of dominant Western epistemologies by visibilizing who is making the knowledge, and how they are doing so.3 For me, arts-based research as a mode of inquiry supports this decolonial subversion by centering local and reflexive dialogue (Image 1). By beginning with my embodied self (my clothes, my backpack of snacks) as the focus, I avoid a zero-point epistemology and ground myself as a subjective participant in the physical and epistemological space of the botanical garden. Simultaneously, as an autoethnography, it is not enough to act as a visual journal; the work must engage the viewer and connect with method, theory, and critique.4 Sketching as visual inquiry abstracts the subject from the setting,5 and revisiting these sketches reminded me of sensations from the experience: the itchiness of the wool jacket, the fact that it was too warm and I removed the jacket immediately, the pebbles and dirt on my bare feet, the fact that I had brought socks but did not wear them because I do not like to wear socks.
![Image 2 : Utility paths and ponds
[ The image is of another two pages in the sketchbook, once again drawn using a black ink brush pen. The left page includes small sketches of paths in the botanical garden along with notes on what the artist observed about the utility of the paths. The graded path is drawn with a person in a mobility device, to emphasize what the artist noticed about accessibility. There is also a drawing of a shoe with rocks coming out of it, which the artist connects to secondary paths paved with gravel. At the bottom of the page is a drawing of an empty plastic container and apple core, as the artist ate her snacks. The right page is of two scenes in the garden. The first drawing is a more detailed landscape of a pond and an old willow tree. The artist notes that she did not find any Taxodium. The second drawing is of the interactive pavilion in the First Nations Garden. There are displays of cultural items, and a digital screen showing short Indigenous films. The screen display says “DRAG” beside the picture of a person’s face. The notes beneath the drawing describe that the artist’s favorite short film was one of a young man performing drag for the first time.]
Image by the author.](https://i0.wp.com/niche-canada.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Tracy_Image-2-Cropped.png?resize=970%2C765&ssl=1)
[ The image is of another two pages in the sketchbook, once again drawn using a black ink brush pen. The left page includes small sketches of paths in the botanical garden along with notes on what the artist observed about the utility of the paths. The graded path is drawn with a person in a mobility device, to emphasize what the artist noticed about accessibility. There is also a drawing of a shoe with rocks coming out of it, which the artist connects to secondary paths paved with gravel. At the bottom of the page is a drawing of an empty plastic container and apple core, as the artist ate her snacks. The right page is of two scenes in the garden. The first drawing is a more detailed landscape of a pond and an old willow tree. The artist notes that she did not find any Taxodium. The second drawing is of the interactive pavilion in the First Nations Garden. There are displays of cultural items, and a digital screen showing short Indigenous films. The screen display says “DRAG” beside the picture of a person’s face. The notes beneath the drawing describe that the artist’s favorite short film was one of a young man performing drag for the first time.]
Image by the author.
Taxus sp. (revisited) and Scientific Imperialism
It was funny that I got the wrong plant species, and this exchange provoked me to think about the different systems for knowing and relating to plants. Had I remembered the common name for Taxodium sp. (cypress) I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by clarifying that I was looking for cypress trees, and not yews (Taxus), as the only similarity the two have was that their genus both start with Tax-. As an ornamental horticulturist, three years of applied taxonomy and plant identification courses drummed Latin names into my head much deeper than commonly used English names. This is a useful and often necessary repository of knowledge when working within the colonial frameworks that botanical gardens are built on, and the sheer number of unique species contained therein, but removes the plant from its original environment and sociocultural context.
Western empires developed these classification systems, and using that epistemic privilege, was able to naturalize this knowledge system as having no geopolitical location.6 Latin nomenclature and the development of Western enlightenment and scientific objectivity went on to disqualify alternative forms of knowledge, including Indigenous, traditional, folk, and women’s knowledges.7 The same taxonomic processes used by colonial botanists to categorize plant specimens were used to classify humans depending on skin colour and Eurocentric judgements of character.8 In addition, the rise of empire facilitated the rise of botanical gardens by elevating botanical studies from an amateur endeavor to a formalized and professional level.9 Modern Western countries continue to leverage this wealth of scientific knowledge, medical patents, and technological advances gained during colonial expansion continue to support the uneven flow of energy, knowledge, and resources from developing countries.10
The Role of Botanical Gardens as Exhibits and Identity
Contemporary literature on decolonization and natural collections implicates Western science in the creation of authoritative knowledge,11 but often does not interrogate the colonial construct of nature and collections, nor does it discuss the de-centered and non-Western ways of knowing that are equally rigourous and complex as Enlightenment based science. Except for neoliberal conservation literature as applied to botanical gardens,12 and a recent academic conference from the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew,13 botanical gardens have yet to approach institutional values and organizational history from a decolonial lens. While many texts analyze the role of botanical gardens during colonial expansion they often do not address the contemporary contexts of botanical gardens as institutions built on ideologies of coloniality that have pivoted their missions to reflect concern for environmental degradation, often directly related to colonial resource extraction practices.14
Despite these modern identities championing important subjects such as biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation (“Policy – Convention on Biological Diversity”, 2018), botanical gardens can be analyzed as museums and environmental spaces embedded in processes of Western colonization and neocolonialism. Cultural institutions can influence social narratives of national and local identity, often through glorified colonial encounters that reinforce class and racial distinctions.15 It stands to reason that these colonial dynamics can also be reproduced in contemporary environmental education and science communication.16
As an academic in a Western institution, I am not excused from participating these dynamics. As an immigrant from mainland China and settler-Canadian, I am also entangled in a history of globalization and settler-colonial expansion, while embodying a lived experience of non-Western and racialized diaspora in a colonized nation-state. Some of this affected my observations, included what I chose not to sketch or depict:
“I made my way to the Chinese cultural garden but could not bring myself to sit down. The pagodas and lakes were accurate1, but I found them uncanny in their representation. There were no Chinese visitors in this part of the garden, though I had come across Chinese visitors in other parts. I was reminded of visiting imperial gardens at Chinese cultural sites; the mountains and oceans of dark heads crowding for tourist photos. To suddenly be one among thousands was a novel and strange experience for me, having grown up in a space where I rarely saw myself represented.”
Spry (2013) describes performative autoethnography as a way of making the personal political and making the researcher’s own embodied knowledge into a co-performative agent of interpretation.17 Combined with In Situ Observational Sketching the sketches and writing act as a partial and deliberately chosen representation, with less detail but greater resonance than conventional photographs.18 As an exploration of visual arts-based inquiry and visual methodologies,19 sketches represent both the visible and the visual: images and phenomena that are seen, verses how they are perceived and interpreted through the representations constructed by the researcher.20 By sketching from location as opposed to memory, I was situating myself in space, but also in time: heritage sites in China, previous experiences in this exact garden, and memories of my grandparents in the countryside all layered to create an embodied and visceral reaction to the landscape.
Arts-Based Research as Intervention in the Traditional Academy
There are many ways arts-based research can be an intervention challenging the formal traditions of the Western university, with a capacity to ‘vex’ and intervene in existing discourse.21 In addition, coloniality/decoloniality developed outside of Western academic frameworks through the minds of South American thinkers including Indigenous Andean, Black, and Chicano scholars, making it a fitting parallel to research-creation’s countering to Eurocentric modes of inquiry.22
The objective is to make visible these Eurocentric narratives, not only around the history of plant and environmental sciences, but also in contemporary botanical garden narratives. Arts-based research methodologies aid by refusing the disembodied and generalizing perspective of the Anthropocene and committing to an acknowledgement of the artist-researcher’s relationality to others. The apocalyptic ending of environments is already a lived experience for many Indigenous communities and populations in colonized nations facing regular catastrophic weather events.23 Engagement with empathetic and non-discursive forms of research could be a way to communicate the subject matter in a way that counters traditional systems of knowledge and power.24 In this way, arts-based research can be used as a critically reflexive methodology that encourages re-evaluating modes of governance, interpretation, curation, and our understanding of ourselves as part of nature
Notes:
1 Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom:” Theory, Culture & Society (2010). Vol 26. Issue 7-8,1-23.
2 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (2007): 168–78; Katja Grötzner Neves, Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).
3 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience.”
4 Tami Spry, “Performative Autoethnography.” In Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Fourth edition. (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2013), 497-511.
5 Sue Heath, Lynne Chapman, and The Morgan Centre Sketchers. “Observational Sketching as Method.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 21, 6 (2018): 720.
6 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience,” 167.
7 Mary Beatrice Kenny, “Ojibway Plant Taxonomy at Lac Seul First Nation, Ontario, Canada.” Graduate Thesis, 2000, Lakehead University; Mary Louise Pratt Imperial Eyes. 2 edition. (London : New York: Routledge, 2007); Londa L. Schiebinger 1998. “Lost Knowledge, Bodies of Ignorance, and the Poverty of Taxonomy as Illustrated by the Curious Fate of Flos Pavonis, an Abortifacient.” In Picturing Science, Producing Art. (New York: Routledge, 1998), 125-144.
8 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Second edition. (London : New York: Routledge, 2007).
9 Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46, 4 (2016): 659–79.
10 Lucile H. Brockway, “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist 6, 3 (1979): 11.
11 S. Das and M. Lowe, “Nature Read in Black and White: Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections.” Journal of Natural Science Collections (2018): 4.
12 Neves, Postnormal Conservation, 62.
13 Richard Drayton, “The Kew Gardens Miscellaneous Reports as an Archive of Global History.” Presented at the Botany, Empire, and Trade Conference, King’s College, London, March 2, 2021; Jim Endersby, Miranda Lowe, Felix Driver, Rohan Deb Roy, and Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp. “Archival Affordances.” Presented at the Botany, Trade and Empire Conference, Online conference, March 3, 2021.
14 Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46, 4 (2016): 659–79; Neves, Postnormal Conservation, 69; Lucile H Brockway, 1979. “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist 6, 3 (1979): 449–65; Richard H Grove. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 – 1860. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Donal P McCracken. Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997).
15 Tony Bennett, Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays. (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017); Lianne Mctavish, Susan Ashley, Heather Igloliorte, Kirsty Robertson, and Andrea Terry. “Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Conversation.” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region / Revue d’histoire de La Region Atlantique 46 (January) (2017): 223– 41.
16 Neves, Postnormal Conservation; Tallie Segel, “Master Scripts of Nature.” Lecture, Concordia University, October 16, 2018.
17 Spry, “Performative Autoethnography,” 215.
18 Heath, Chapman, and The Morgan Centre Sketchers. “Observational Sketching as Method.”
19 Susan Finley, “Chapter 6: Arts-Based Research.” In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues. (United Kingdom:SAGE Publications, 2007): 71-83.
20 Jon D. Prosser, “Visual Methodology.” In Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. (United Kingdom: SAGE Publications, 2013): 177.
21 Tom Barone and Elliot W. Eisner, Arts Based Research. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012). Owen B. Chapman, and Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances.’” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, 1 (2012): 5-26; Natalie Loveless. Knowings & Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2020); Jill Didur. “Beyond Anti-Conquest: Unearthing the Botanical Archive with Locative Media.” Intermédialités, no. 35 (2020): 24pp.
22 Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Aníbal Quijano. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (2007): 168–78; Mignolo. “Epistemic Disobedience”
23 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, 4 (2017): 761–80.
24 Spry, “Performative Autoethnography,” 225.
Tracy Qiu