Jennifer Wanner

Jennifer Wanner’s exhibition “Bower” at Paul Kuhn Gallery consists of two new works along with related works from two earlier series, “Periculum” and “Absentia.” In all of these pieces, Wanner uses photographic images of endangered plant species to raise a host of ethical questions about climate change, genetic engineering and invasive species, while exploring the intersection between the history of art and the history of science (most obviously the collecting and representing of natural specimens). Images of endangered plants are sourced from the Internet, printed, painstakingly cut out and reassembled into collages and animations that pointedly violate canons of realism (scale and proportion, for example, fly out the window). The two new works in “Bower” both feature an endangered water plant from southern Alberta, Bolander’s quillwort, as it seeks refuge from the climate crisis.

Wanner’s method can be placed in the tradition of the work of the 18th-century writer, amateur botanist and artist Mary Delany (aka Mrs Delany), who invented a new technique for botanical illustration. Rather than pressing and drying individual plant specimens, Delany made paper collages (or, in her terms, “paper mosaicks”), cutting out and assembling hundreds of tiny pieces of coloured paper to accurately represent plant species, which, incidentally, remained truer in colour than real specimens. Delany produced almost a thousand of these collages in 10 volumes, collectively entitled the “Flora Delanica,” now housed in the British Museum. As with the related genres of the botanical garden, the herbal and the herbarium or “hortus siccus” (an album or “garden” of dried plants), there were aesthetic, scientific and moral aims behind Delany’s collection: by bringing together all of these specimens, Delany was reassembling the universal knowledge that was lost with our expulsion from our original bower—the Garden of Eden.

Wanner’s work has a different moral purpose from Delany’s: urging an awareness of what is currently being lost in our ecological crisis. Individual works in the earlier series “Periculum” bring together images of endangered plants from each of the provinces and territories, and the country as a whole. Inkjet images of different plants are cut out by hand, and then collaged together to produce a single new Frankenplant for each province or territory, thus lessening the labour of saving many different species. The work satirizes our desire to look to science and technology for easy solutions to problems that were in fact caused by looking to science and technology for easy solutions. The works in “Absentia” recycle the detritus of the first project, layering the original pictures from which the individual plants used in “Periculum” were carefully removed. We see through the gaps, to other absences below. The result is a more disorienting set of layered images, difficult to resolve visually and without the lightness of the other series.

“Bower” builds on the ecological themes of the earlier work but introduces the idea of plant agency. Its two parts are a 4:58-minute stop-motion animation film (Part I) and a spectacular 5’ × 8’6” collage (Part II). In the animation, we see an industrious little plant, the Bolander’s quillwort, trying to build a structure out of other plants and flowers. It laboriously drags each specimen from off-screen and assembles an arch that flourishes and f lowers but ul t imat e l y collapses. The collage features individual hand-cut images of 151 endangered plants, assembled into a glorious fan shape. The images are float-mounted, making the assemblage three-dimensional, echoing the effect produced by Delany’s layered collages or the dried but never completely flat specimens in a hortus siccus. The story Wanner offers is that the plant, having failed to produce the desired shelter in the animation, decides instead to genetically modify itself to produce and indeed become its own bower, by literally incorporating its fellow threatened species.

By putting a plant’s agency and intentions at the centre of the two pieces, the exhibition willingly risks the danger of anthropomorphization: lending human characteristics to the non-human in a process that heightens the possibility of empathy but threatens to flatten the specificity and difference of the non-human species. This is most obvious in the animation, where the plant moves in a jerky, semi-comic fashion, evoking the early natural history films of the surrealist Jean Painlevé.

To animate is, literally, to ensoul, and here we might see an echo of the ancient theory of the tripartite soul. Building on Plato and Aristotle, medieval philosophers argued for the existence of three kinds of souls: the vegetative soul, which concerned itself with nutrition, growth and reproduction; the sensitive soul, which was concerned with the senses, movement and the emotions; and the intellective soul, which controlled memory, reason and imagination. Everything that was alive was ensouled, and the theory was additive: plants had a vegetative soul; animals had both a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul; and humans had all three. In the more Platonic-inspired versions, plants were seen to be capable of sensation, desire, pleasure and pain, and in all versions, the vegetative soul was the principle of life itself. Posthumanist theorists like Jane Bennett urge us to reconsider obsolete scientific theories as a way of breaking free of contemporary patterns of thought, and plant philosophers have seized on the potential of the tripartite soul for reassessing our ethical relations with plants. We share a common soul with plants, and in some versions of the theory, we even start as plants. Entertaining this commonality enforces an ethical relation and a duty of care: plants are not mere mechanistic organisms; they are fellow creatures with agency and desires.

In “Bower,” the plant desires refuge. We empathize with its disappointment when its initial bower collapses, and marvel at the beauty of its transformation in the collage. The wort has metamorphosed into a vegetal butterfly. Plants do adapt but not in this spectacular form; the hyperbolic nature of this transformation should caution us against imagining that nature can look after itself. Rather, the empathy evoked should push us to remember our ethical obligation to our fellow plants, in helping them to survive a problem of our own making. ❚

“Bower” was exhibited at Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary, from February 3, 2024, to March 30, 2024.

Jim Ellis is a professor of English and director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities at the University of Calgary.