Anna Paluch
Though gallery spaces have been host to many a unique installation, the inclusion of plant life or other biological materials within such curated spaces often warrants a double-take or posed selfie – a side effect of contemporary houseplant no doubt. American artist Rashid Johnson’s installations titled Plateaus (2014) and Capsule (2020-21) are such works – living, thriving, consisting of potted plants in a controlled and (extremely aesthetic) curated space. Johnson’s work is most often what comes to mind first, as it is globally known, when one is asked to think about plant life as art.
In 2019, Ottawa-based artist Zainab Hussain created a guerilla-garden of sorts titled Area Rug, made up of native weeds and placed within a makeshift living space, acting as the area rug (thus the name). Similar to Hussain’s installation, Canadian artists Alana Bartol, Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis’s collaborative work titled a hint of perennial magic lingers in its fingertips (2018) is site-specific, yet in Bartol’s case, the work uses both native and non-native plants, examining their relationships to urban development. This natural take-over of the gallery space does not always stay within the confines of a pot, box or tarp. Full room installations, whether permanent, such as American artist Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (1977-Present) or temporary, such as Polish artist Diana Lelonek’s Composter (2021) use natural elements like earth, leaves, twigs or branches to create imposing rooms, breaking the barriers of interior and exterior space. Curious about the process these artists go through in creating such site-specific and ever-changing pieces, I sat down with Zainab Hussain to inquire about what motivates artists like herself into working with plant life.
Zainab Hussain, Area Rug [detail], 2019, site-specific garden installation, mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist.
Anna Paluch: Could you please introduce yourself and your art practice?
Zainab Hussain: My name is Zainab Hussain, and I am an interdisciplinary artist. I work in a variety of different mediums to create installations, especially, creating installations that can be interacted with, filling the space. Where people can move through them and somehow situate themselves within it. I’ve been doing a lot of textile work recently, but I really love working with plants. It’s a really challenging medium and it’s somewhat of a collaboration working with something else that has very specific requirements to be able to exist as part of your piece. I personally am a houseplant enthusiast and an aspiring gardener.
AP: Could you go into more detail about your garden-specific piece called Area Rug?
ZH: Area Rug was primarily inspired by an interest in exploring spaces [urban, rural, interior, exterior] and how we inhabit them. I’m always interested in these sorts of interactions of things that don’t go together: so interior and exterior spaces, familiar and unfamiliar, inhabited and uninhabited, organic and inorganic. A lot of my work also focuses on the idea of the home, of being at home, of finding your place and the idea of homemaking. So, I envisioned a living room setting with the comfortable chair, side table and lamp. But in the spot where you may have a small rug, instead I transplanted about a square meter of plant life from an area of the city that was kind of a transient space. An empty construction site, a place that has been clear-cut and ready for construction, but nothing’s been done with it yet. The plants that grow in that space are called colonizer plants and they’re usually the first plants that grow in a space that has nothing – if you leave the plot alone long enough you may end up with a forest again. A lot of the plants could be considered invasive, and I found that idea interesting when you’re talking about movement and displacement and migration of people: who is colonizing, who is immigrating, and how people land from one place to another, and decide to make it theirs. Similarly, these plants can make a seemingly inhospitable area their own space.
There’s also a time limit to interacting with the plants as it is a living installation, and you see that change in how they die: some of them put out their seeds or some just go yellow, and then other ones do fine and they continue to grow throughout the duration of that installation. It is an ever-changing, evolving installation and furthermore it requires care – it requires upkeep. I had a watering can off to the side that I kept full of water which meant viewers could choose to water the plants themselves, or I would come by to check on it.
AP: On the topic of migration, and examining how these plants belong to these transient spaces, I’m interested in how the work manifests in different locations. You initially installed it at the University of Ottawa during the Master of Fine Arts group show and open house. How different was the piece when exhibited at Plumb Gallery in Toronto? Did you use different plants for each and source them locally?
ZH: An important part of the work is using local plants and sourcing a location. In Ottawa for instance, I took it from an area of land that was cleared for future infrastructure in Kanata. This area is a controversial site as it was originally an old growth forest. The “new” wasn’t coming so the land was left in limbo and plants re-grew. In Toronto, I ended up finding an area that was under construction near the Harbourfront. The history of the area was like the Ottawa location: piles of dirt and plants that had started to grow on the earth where nothing had been developed.
Even the furniture that we used in the piece was sourced locally. I worked with the curators to talk about their own experience of young people living in Toronto. The Ottawa furniture was older, bigger furniture like in a ‘grandmother’s’ home. The Toronto show had a secondhand futon couch, like in a college apartment – a bit of a commentary on the cost of living in downtown Toronto.
AP: When we think about a garden in the traditional sense, in relation to art, we either think of paintings of landscapes, romanticized ideals of the garden or landscape architecture. Do you feel like your installation is perhaps a way to marry these various concepts of landscape and aesthetic in art history or perhaps is this a way to completely flip these ideas on their head and approach “the garden” and the artistry of the garden in a new way?
ZH: I wasn’t really thinking about the role of the garden specifically in art history, probably because I wasn’t necessarily thinking about this as a garden per se. For me, a garden is something that is controlled, manufactured, curated which maybe in some part I was doing, but part of the work was to not control what is happening within that area rug – to not pick and choose what plants exist in the space. We have this idea of “good” plants and “bad” plants – a garden is where you pick out the “good” plants and you get rid of the weeds. Within the installation most of the plants would be considered weeds. In fact, I wanted the weeds because those plants grow even when you don’t want them to. Even against your best efforts a weed will grow anywhere, as opposed to plants in a garden which require upkeep and cultivation. I wanted hardy plants that would stay alive and live through the trauma of being dug up and moved.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of this process in relation to art history but maybe more thinking about plants and in general, how materials occupy a space – whether it’s the chair or whether it’s the plants. What is their current meaning in our cultural context and how does that add or interact with the artwork? I view the plants in a way like these entities with their own identity and how they can play off each other.
AP: Could you speak more about the plants as entities, perhaps even as artistic partners?
ZH: I think a lot of my work is object-based where I view my materials as objects and often, I would like to use materials that essentially have a life outside of me. Whether it is textiles or plants, they are something that would have a use in a life outside of just being in an artwork, and I think that turns the project or the work into a collaborative effort – it’s not only me and my ideas but also how the artwork is interpreted and viewed. These items have a life, they have a history that extends beyond the frame of just the work and that enriches the work. I’m also thinking about how people often make a hierarchy of things ranging from inanimate to animate and between animate. If we think of an object as a chair or a book and then a Being as an animal or human, a plant is somewhere in between. We feel that it’s more okay somehow to eat plants than animals – there’s this idea that they’re not thinking or feeling. But they are growing and living, and they do have a massive impact on the environment. They seem to be able to have a will in shaping their respective environments almost as much as we do, and we often must work in partnership with them. For instance, plants help us stop our coastlines from eroding. We are living in a partnership with plants and so in that case, being able to create any work with plants is a collaboration.
AP: Could you speak briefly about your interest in community gardens as art practice?
ZH: This is something that I thought about as a potential future project / artwork. I’ve seen and heard about the impact that community gardens have had for people in their lives and for communities in general. I also think that the community garden or sharing private lawn space for public use, essentially sharing space and not necessarily considering land as being owned by anyone specific, focuses on this idea that we can all work together and cultivate and grow food sustainably and locally. I think that that’s something that is very relevant to sustainable futures, and I am really interested in that as a subject matter for potentially expanding my own practice. It’s definitely a complicated subject to approach even just logistically – you have to put in the time and the effort and also gain the knowledge of garden caretaking. I think there’s a lot around that area of research, so I’m really interested in learning more about that.
Zainab Hussain is a first generation Indian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and Illustrator based in Ottawa, Ontario. Working in photography, paint, textiles, sound, plants, text, and installation, Hussain is interested in the intertwining of multiple histories and narratives, notions of untranslatability, what is hidden and revealed, and the authenticity of memory and identity. Her work often uses humour to implicate viewers in considering the role that lost histories and objects play in building present and future identities within the diasporic experience.
Anna (Ania) Paluch is a Polish-Canadian PhD student in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University (2016-2023), whose thesis focuses on cross-cultural dialogues between Indigenous and Eastern European artists and filmmakers. She is also a part-time professor of Art History (Non-Western Futurism, Folk Art) at the University of Ottawa, situated on unceded Algonquin territory. Her research interests include Indigenous North American and Eastern European Futurism, spaces of cultural hybridity, folk and craft history, and post-memory in the diaspora. She is a curator, mixed-media artist, cultural educator through the Young Polish Canadian Professional Association (YPCPA), and a board member of various culturally-based or social justice-led Polish-community organizations based in Ottawa (YPCPA), Montreal (Polski Piknik), Toronto (Cielesne), Winnipeg (Polonia Inclusive) and Vancouver (Polonia Inclusive).