Radicant

Miranda Bellamy & Amanda Fauteux with Colleen Coco Collins

4k video (duration 19:03), 2024

Meticulously detailed botanical models crafted from papier-mâché, glass beads, gelatin, and feathers form the starting point for Radicant. Originally manufactured by the Brendel Company in Berlin in the late nineteenth century, these models were purchased by the University of Otago (Ōtepoti, Aotearoa) as vital teaching aids in biology and botany. In this work, individual models are transposed using 3D scanning and CAD technologies into an intimate virtual space, accompanied by the words and voice of Colleen Coco Collins, who weaves the stories of each plant and fungus represented, illuminating them as multi-layered and unique characters and tracing the long roots of our relationships to plants and fungi. 

Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

The artists acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you Colleen Coco Collins, Dr. Pamela Cornes and Dr. Janice Lord, the Department of Botany – University of Otago, Dr. Greg Holwell and the McGregor Museum – The University of Auckland, YYZ Artists Outlet, Struts Gallery, and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.