Dimensions: variable. Approximately 30 x 25 feet

Mixed media installation: sunflower stalks and grapefruit skins chine colle with lithograph drawings or painted, wire, glass beads, DNA model connectors, laboratory glassware, metal caps and Bunsen burners, sea balls, seed pods, sculpey, silicone rubber, resin, papier mache, paint and dye.

My childhood years were spent in a garden paradise in Australia. My mother was an avid gardener and I have carried her passion into my adult life. Since those early years in the 1940s, 50s and 60s traditional gardening and agriculture have changed radically by sciences’ influence on the direction of natural history. Darwinian evolutionary theory shaped our understanding of the world.  Recent uses of biotechnology are changing the future of our planet without a clear understanding how the experimental organisms interact with the environment. Many of the new organisms have been created through genetic engineering. Ecological disruption has occurred, species have become extinct as biodiversity shrinks and despite the optimism of the biotech industry I wonder how well the public is being served. We are not informed about the foods that contain GMOs, chemical use in agriculture has increased, possible health issues cannot be studied and the biotech- corporate control over food resources and production has spread over the entire world.

The manipulation of plant organisms takes place at the molecular level. The microscopic cells in a seed are the carriers of the fundamental structure of plant life. In this work I was interested in creating representations of cells enlarged to gigantic proportions. I use transformations of ephemeral materials such as dried sunflower stalks and grapefruit skins to allude to the structure of the cell. Silicone rubber is like the liquid material of the Petri dish.  Coloured glass beads and wire balls have been used to suggest the components of DNA. My inclusion of scientific apparatus relates to the laboratory and its disruption of nature. In some of the cells I have included references to scientific methodology laboratory glassware, Bunsen burners, and transformed cells.

The centre of Archipelago is the river. To create this metaphorically I have hundreds of small gardens positioned to form a river that meanders through the countryside without beginning or end. In Edmonton the North Saskatchewan River remains a natural source of water and reminds us of our responsibility to keep it as an unspoiled resource, which sustains animals, plants and humans giving such meaning to life. The miniature gardens are again metaphors for the diversity of environments that may disappear as a result of our technological interference.