Art & Design faculty and inaugural Rutgers University–New Brunswick Laureate Sue Huang (pictured) has marshaled the resources of art, language, history, and science in her effort to reintroduce several long-dead New Jersey plant species to the public.
Her laureate project, Bodies of Flora, will culminate on May 1 in what the artist and designer describes as a “lecture-performance” that explores botanical loss and visualizes the resurrection of vanished plants. Huang will present Bodies of Flora on May 1 at the Jersey Art Book Fair at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.
Of course, this kind of collaboration is key to the laureate program’s mission, namely: cultivating meaningful cross-disciplinary connections among faculty; and nurturing engagement with the arts and humanities across the wider community.
To make Bodies of Flora a reality, Huang enlisted help from the Chrysler Herbarium and Mycological Collection, as well as from the Department of Plant Biology and the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, all of which are part of the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. She also collaborated with graduate software engineering student Kundan Kumar Reddy Digavinti to develop a software tool that reconstructs plant forms from historical descriptions and generates three-dimensional models using artificial intelligence. Art & Design graduate students Asem Kiyalova and Anukriti Kaushik assisted Huang in developing and researching the project, which revisits the forms of lost plant species to explore memory and ecological loss.
“We are looking at these descriptions, and I was thinking about ways of using this language, which describes the plant body, to bring these plants back into the cultural consciousness through a range of social practices and material explorations, including the generation of visual and audio materials” Huang says. “I use language to give these botanical ghosts a body.”
Excerpted from an article by Mike Lucas. Read more about Bodies of Flora at Rutgers Today.
Image credit: Jeff Arban/Rutgers University