Wild Plant Series

Title
Wild Plant Series

Year
2016

Medium:
Latex on Plantation Ledger Pages

Dimensions:
22" x 13"

Photo Credit:
Mark Doroba

Collector:
Collection of artist

Annalee Davis’ gentle drawings of roots and wild plants pull our attention to this singular, overarching mission of globalization to achieve profit, and to its violent consequences, but also, simultaneously, to nature’s awesome resolve.

—Andil Gosine, Wilding, exhibition catalogue, 2016 

This 2016 series of drawings functions as graphic interventions into 1970s ledger pages, the substrate designed to log economic activity on the plantation. Data entered into ledger pages comprised registering wages, field activity and rent rolls as well as measuring rainfall and the signing out of agricultural implements to plantation labourers. 

Some years ago, I found hundreds of ledger pages on the floor of an abandoned bookkeeper’s office on the sugar plantation where I grew up–frogs and lizards were running over them. My family had not lived there for more than 25 years. I recognised my mother’s handwriting in some of the columns along with several names of men and women who worked on the plantation in the 70s and 80s.

I came across these wild plants while walking in former sugar cane fields and have come to think of them as active agents in the process of decolonising the fields, performing a quiet revolution in the soil by asserting themselves against an imperial, monocrop landscape. Taught to see them as unwanted weeds in the furrows of sugar cane fields and often removed by pesticides, I unlearned that way of thinking and began to understand their value in offering biodiversity to the land along with their historic use for bush teas, baths and medicine.

Collecting, pressing and drawing these wild plants, complicates the single economic story written in these plantation ledger pages, acknowledging their medicinal properties and earlier use as an apothecary by those who were enslaved and laboured on the plantation. I thought that my drawing these wild plants onto these found ledger pages might offer alternate ways of reading the site while countering the daily logging of economic activity. 

This was exhibited in my solo exhibition, This Ground Beneath My Feet - A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands, The Idea Lab, The Warfield Gallery, Austin, Texas, 2016-2017 and is one of four works in my solo exhibition re: wilding at Haarlem Artspace in 2020. It was also included in the virtual project Haarlem Periodical along with UK artists, Feral Practice, Deirdre O’Mahony and Pauline Woolley.

Installation view as part of my solo exhibition, This Ground Beneath My Feet - A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands, The Idea Lab, The Warfield Gallery, Austin, Texas, 2016-2017