LA Botanical
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LA Botanical is a series of ambrotype photographs of plant specimens found in the greater Los Angeles area. It was conceived by the multidisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell in the wake of Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in 2005. The aftermath, particularly the inability and unwillingness of the Federal Government to respond to the crisis in flooded New Orleans, highlighted the vulnerability of a populace stranded in the face of natural, and human induced calamity in the world’s most powerful nation. As a mother raising her young child in a sprawling American city Campbell was compelled to ask: when the supply chain is disrupted and the supermarkets are empty, and there is no sign of aid reaching you, how can ‘art’ be useful? Campbell was raised on pastureland dotted with remnants of native bush inland from Wairoa township, on Aotearoa New Zealand’s rural East Coast. Her family were farmers, botanists and gardeners. Upon migrating to Los Angeles in 1999, she observed a fundamentally alien relationship between the city and its vegetation. Plants that had been introduced by waves of immigrants for food, fuel or medicine had gradually run wild across the city scape, the knowledge of their utility lost to time and neglect induced by a form of industrialized capitalism that was both aggressive and immersive. This book sets out to reveal the breadth of attributes ascribed to the weeds of Los Angeles via the enchantment of its seductive contents: plants rendered ethereal by the wet-plate photographic process that emerged simultaneous with the city itself. Tessa Laird, in her essay within this volume, calls this book “. . . a poisoner’s handbook, a herbalist’s cure-all, a shaman’s bundle, a gardener’s guide, a botanist’s field manual, an artist’s scrapbook.” It can be all these things. This book is multidisciplinary in its scope, but it exists primarily as an artwork. The first-edition was published in 2007, to accompany the exhibition LA Botanical at G727 – a Los Angeles gallery dedicated to generating dialogue via artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape. This 2022 second-edition reissue by Rim Books, published on the occasion of the exhibition at Two Rooms gallery in Aotearoa New Zealand and featuring two extra plates, is now reproduced in duotone with a foreword by Dr. Susan Ballard, and a new cover, hand-printed on a vintage Asbern letter-press by the artist in twenty distinct botanical iterations, with edition ranging from 14 – 30 copies each, all individually numbered and autographed by the artist.
Author: Joyce Campbell
ISBN: 9781991165213
Publisher: Rim Books
Published: 15/12/2022
Format: Paperback / softback
About the Author
Joyce Campbell (b. Aotearoa New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury (1992) and an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (1999). She has lived, taught, and worked in Southern California and in Auckland, New Zealand, and has undertaken residencies in New Zealand (2001) and Antarctica (2006). Her recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques, such as the daguerreotype and ambrotype, as well as conventional analogue and digital photography, video, film, and sculpture to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems. Campbell’s interest in biological and physical systems has led her to develop a set of photographic techniques that render visible the minute and incremental emergence of complex form, be that the growth of a microbial colony, crystals in the process of formation, the migration of glaciers into the ocean, or of silver from an electrode dispersing into colloidal suspension. She produces mural-scale photographs that invite her audiences to immerse themselves in the environments depicted. Campbell has participated in numerous exhibitions both in New Zealand and abroad including The Future is already here- it’s just not evenly distributed: The 20th Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island & Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2016), Heavenly Bodies, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2014), Che Mondo: What a World, Curated by Carole Ann Klonarides, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2013), Te Taniwha/Crown Coach, Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA September (2012), The Liquid Archive, Curated by Geraldine Barlow, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2012), Altogether Elsewhere, Curated by Rob Tufnell for the Zoo Art Fair, London, Great Britain (2009). In 2019 the major survey exhibition On The Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the work of Joyce Campbell curated by John Welchman opened at The Adam Art Gallery in Wellington. Tessa Laird completed her Doctorate in Fine Arts at Elam, the University of Auckland in 2012. Laird has exhibited works locally and nationally in artist-run spaces, private galleries as well as public art institutions such as: In the Hand (Sarjeant Gallery, 2018), Turn of the Wheel (Malcolm Smith Gallery, 2016), Five by Five: New Conversations with Clay(Te Uru Contemporary Art Gallery, 2015), House of Bats (Corbans Estate Arts Centre, 2014), We Are But Dust and Shadow with Richard Orjis and Tiffany Singh (Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland, 2014), Slip Cast (The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 2014), Freedom Farmers: New Zealand Artists Growing Ideas (Auckland Art Gallery, 2013-2014), Reading Room with Peter Lange (Objectspace, Auckland, 2012) and the Portage Ceramic Awards(Lopdell House, Titirangi, 2012). Work by Laird was recently featured in Art News New Zealand and additionally she has published her own artist books both with Clouds publications: A Rainbow Reader (2014) and Shards of the Jealous Potter (2006), as well as writing a monograph for the acclaimed Reaktion Animal series, Bat (2018). Laird is currently based in Melbourne and works as an academic lecturing in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the School of Arts, University of Melbourne and as a writer alongside her arts practise. Dr Susan Ballard is an Associate Professor of art history at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where she teaches courses on art and the environment, affect and memory, and art writing. Her work spans the fields of art history, creative nonfiction, and environmental humanities. She writes for both academic and general audiences, and is particularly interested in collaborative narrative, nonfiction and fiction as a mode of art history.