Saw in half

Saw in half is a project that documents the presence of Tasmanian flora within the island of Ireland. Presented at Void Gallery in 2022, the body of work draws upon 16mm film to examine the translation of botanical material and knowledge between Malahide, Tasmania and Malahide, Ireland.

In the foreground of the exhibition is Malahide Castle, and the enduring residue of the collecting practices of its former resident, Lord Milo Talbot. A British diplomat, botanist, and the 7th and last Baron of Malahide, Talbot was a keen gardener, who traveled widely to: “find [rare] plants growing in the wild and attempt to persuade them to accustom themselves to life in my garden”. Whether in their feebleness or reluctance to flower, such plants however typically bore the marks of this improbable transposition; as if resisting the habituation to their staged environment, and elucidating an inseparability to the natural context with which they were removed from. It was this antipodean incongruity that led Talbot to commission a group of 35 drawings of Tasmanian plants, from which six volumes of botanical books titled The Endemic Flora of Tasmania emerged; a pictorial history classifying Tasmanian flora.