Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux: Terrarium

Curator: Emily Falvey.

“Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl.” —Natalie Angier, 2009

What do plants have to say about their lives under colonial capitalism? In the exhibition Terrarium, artistic partners Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux seek answers to this question in the electrochemical signals of plants living in habitats that human intervention has profoundly altered. Translating these signals into sounds and images, their work considers the impossibility of truly communicating with plants, while nonetheless centering their perspectives through practices of listening.

A Wardian Case, the four-channel video installation at the heart of the exhibition, was made after Bellamy and Fauteux visited Kawau Island, Aotearoa New Zealand, and recorded the electrochemical signals of plants living there. In the mid-nineteenth century, copper mines destabilized the ecology of this island, which was then irreversibly changed when Sir George Grey acquired it in 1860. Grey was a colonial settler, naturalist, and governor with an affection for “Wardian cases”—more commonly known as terrariums—a Victorian invention that first made it possible to transport living plant specimens around the globe. Using this technology, the imperialist Grey turned Kawau Island into a “botanical zoo.” In collaboration with the plants that endure there today, Bellamy and Fauteux work to unsettle this legacy through a “chorus and cacophony” of sonified plant-cell signals.

Terrarium, a new series of sandstone sculptures, extends A Wardian Case and links it back to Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Made from the remains of demolished Mount Allison University buildings, these sculptures were carved and extruded from sandstone according to drawings derived from the electrochemical signals of lupin, raspberry, spotted hawkweed, february daphne, and fern fiddleheads found growing in Sackville’s defunct Pickard Quarry. Once the source of Mount Allison’s famous sandstone, and the origin of these stones, the quarry is now a liminal space of both ecological turmoil and “natural beauty.” Listening to Our Plant Neighbours (2019), the video antecedent to A Wardian Case, joins these two works in a powerful exhibition that offers a unique perspective on the lives of plants in capitalist society.

Miranda Bellamy (she/her) and Amanda Fauteux (she/her) are partners and artistic collaborators who extend the stories of wild plants through site-specific research and experimentation. By listening to plants and responding through interdisciplinary projects, they queer the constructs that separate human beings from non-human beings and make space for the critical revision of human histories. Since their collaborative practice began in 2019, they have attended artist residencies in New York and Vermont, USA, and have exhibited their work in Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the USA. They live in Aotearoa New Zealand and in Sackville, New Brunswick, within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki.

We would like to acknowledge that the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, is located within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki, the unceded ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaq. Our relationship and our privilege to live on this territory was agreed upon in the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725 to 1752. Because of this treaty relationship, it is to be acknowledged that we are all Treaty People and have a responsibility to respect this territory.

Terrarium was made possible thanks to funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative New Zealand, the New Brunswick Arts Board, and the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation. The Owens Art Gallery acknowledges the generous support of all its funders, including Mount Allison University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the New Brunswick Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture, the Town of Sackville, and the Friends of the Owens.