Image Credit: Gina Badger
Workshop: Plant Meditation with Blackberry
Facilitated by Gina Badger
Sunday, February 23, 1 – 2:30pm
Audain Gallery
This event is free but space is limited. Please contact audaingallery@sfu.ca to register.
Helen Cho's exhibition Space Silence incorporates twenty live blackberry plants (Rubus armeniacus) propagated from an industrial site in Vancouver, east of Main Street between Great Northern Way and the railway tracks. This prolific food and medicine plant is emblematic of waste places and roadsides all over the Pacific Northwest. Like many so-called invasive plants, blackberry is an ecosystem colonizer capable of quickly filling ecological vacuums ultimately created by human disturbance. Convenient narratives about troublesome plants "edging out" native species and of "taking over" natural ecosystems employ xenophobic language while obscuring nuanced conversations about the political ecology of settler colonialism as well as the beneficial properties of the plants themselves.
What if blackberry could tell its own story? At the workshop, herbalist Gina Badger will lead a plant meditation in dialogue with the blackberry plants in the exhibition.
Gina Badger practices energetic clinical herbalism, a healing modality that promotes wellbeing through the use of plant-based medicines. She studied at the Blue Otter School of Herbal Medicine, MIT and Concordia University, and worked as an artist and editor for a decade before founding her Vancouver-based practice, Long Spell.