Making Kin with Hell Weed arises from my own concern to be a responsible wildlife gardener – balancing the needs of environmental sustainability and biodiversity in my garden. It draws particularly on the writings of eco-feminists like Donna Haraway on ways of ‘making kin’ between humans and other non-human species. It is also underpinned by the compelling body of recent research since Darwin on plant intelligence, and botanical information about Bindweed itself. All this work points to the probability that Bindweed, like other plants in my garden, is in many ways a sentient and intelligent participant in a complex eco-system, not an invasive existential threat to be completely eradicated by the ‘conscientious gardener’ by any means possible.

This body of photographic work started by trying to ‘see with Bindweed eyes’ drawing on science of plant vision that indicates that every plant cell has light receptors. But plants see shapes, not fine detail, though many seem to distinguish different plant types. Plant leaves see a wider range of red wavelengths than humans to distinguish sunrise, sunset and times of year. Shoots seem to distinguish a wide range of blues to sense where to grow and addess potential competition. My initial images therefore explored the aesthetics of blurred shapes, and images in red and blue gradients applied to different parts of the plant. However it soon became clear that I could never be sure whether this is in fact how Bindweed sees – I do not even know whether other humans see exactly what I do.

So my work became more about my own process of learning, thinking and storytelling about myself and the world from collaboration with ‘Bindweed kin’.