Naive Botany: Reparative Estrangement as Method

In the nineteenth century ‘botanizing’ became a craze. It was something done on the seashore, in the meadows, or on the sidewalk. It was the act of observing, collecting, and identifying, in order to understand the world in terms of its myriad forms and faces. With botanizing as its framework, this presentation discusses how Isabelle Armstrong’s material culture method, in which the historical object becomes an intermediary and active intervener in our perception of the world and history, is applicable to studio practice. Making things is also a visual discipline and connected to the idea of collecting, as collecting describes how we see and gather the world to us through the active perception of what it is we make and do within the studio. This method relies on estrangement. In craft/art practice, mediation creates not just a different view on to the world, but a different territory, the liminal edge upon which one thing transitions to become another. While both studying and making objects allows for the critical dimension of mediation to be put into play, it also allows the space between research and practice to become actual play. Here we begin see the world through the disorienting window of our project, and it is in this space of reparative estrangement that we may re-inhabit the beauty and strangeness of what it is we think we know so well.