The Healing Garden’s branches were foraged from local forest beds and the translucent leaves are made from a homemade bioplastic of red algae, plant gelatine, water, and organic food dyes.
I wanted to create a work that could be returned to the earth as food, not poison.
In the process of creating the work, the climate crisis came into focus for me. As I gathered the tree branches, I became well acquainted with the disease and drought plaguing Germany’s forests. The collapse of ecosystems and the suffering of our earth moved from the abstract and into a lived and embodied knowing.
The Healing Garden never fully came to fruition due to the constraints of Covid-19. In its full conception, it is a public work to hold space for gathering, learning, questioning, imagining, and organising for social and environmental change. Every guest to the garden will add a leaf, allowing it to grow in real time.
The Healing Garden was offered as a space, both personal and communal, to nurture positive social and environmental transformation. Human transformation allows for social transformation: we must heal ourselves so we may heal the world.
The Healing Garden asks what is on the other side of our grief? What is on the other side of healing? How can we move, collectively and individually, to this space of decolonized possibility?