Piece created for The Level 9 Professional Certificate in Art and Ecology, The National College of Art and Design
Instructions for collective group making activity:
Using raw wool make one miniature hat and one miniature scarf by molding the wool into the required shape that would fit a teaseal plant.
Spoken word piece when the collective action is taking place:
I would like to take a moment to honour a humble yet significant plant, Dipsacus fullonum, more commonly known as the teasel.Thank you, teasel, for your service to the textile industry, where your spiny heads were used for carding and raising the nap of fabrics, a critical step in creating smooth, high-quality wollen textiles.
Thank you for your service to human production since the Middle Ages, when your heads were first fitted onto wooden frames. At the height of your use, during the 18th and 19th centuries, your heads worked on an industrial scale, under human hands, to nap woollen fabrics, forever alienated from the product you produced. In modern times we thank you for your continued use in small-scale, high-end textile and wool production.
We are grateful for the past widespread cultivation of your species across England, France, Germany, Italy, Africa, and America, where you grew to meet the needs of textile manufacturers.
Your flowers have fed pollinators—bees, butterflies, and other insects—before you were harvested for our production. We prevented you from completing your life cycle, depriving animals of your seeds and the soil of the nutrients your death would bring. We regret that we didn’t fully appreciate your qualities beyond industrial textile production in the past. As we move toward the Plantroposcene we recognise your natural role within the ecosystem and the environment around us.
Thank you for the essential role you play in the field. Thank you for supporting pollinators with your blooms, for feeding bees, insects, butterflies, and the goldfinch with your flowers and seeds. Thank you for providing water to birds and insects with your cupped leaves. Thank you for stabilising the soil and enriching it with nutrients after your life cycle ends.
Thank you for thriving in lands we consider "disused" or "wasteland," and for bringing function and beauty to those areas, with your unique form standing tall in the landscape.
Thank you, teasel, for all you have given—and continue to give—to both the natural world and the industrial textile industry. As we transition from industrial capitalism toward the Planthroposcene, we want to honour your history and acknowledge the alienation you experienced through the products made by our hands.
In an act of anti-capitalist, anti-industrial intervention, we aim to celebrate and give back to you. We offer wool hats and scarves, crafted by human hands, to adorn the parts of your body that nurture other lifeforms in the field: a hat for your seed head and a scarf to wrap around your cupped leaves.
Through this gesture, we seek to connect with the Planthroposcene, stepping away from the Anthropocene and capitalism, to rekindle our relationship with your species' natural role. We also ask for your forgiveness for the industrial exploitation you endured at our hands in the past
Performed:
The NCAD Field as part of the Level 9 Professional Certificate in Art and Ecology.
