Glyphosate

The Project Glyphosate was created in two parts. The first is an exploration of the land and the second of the soil. My work is meant to be an embodiment of the space that is shown in the images, and a representation of the presence and temporality of the chemical compound known as glyphosate. This is a chemical that saturates plants and soil and is used in forestry with the intention of eliminating competition between deciduous plants and the planted conifer saplings. The chemicals fade over time, but the affected plants still retain evidence and the effects of their coating for up to a decade. The plants depicted are all species that are targeted by glyphosate including broadleaf species and many edible or medicinal plants that are important to the Stó:lō Nation, upon whose traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory this project was conducted. The images were developed with cedar that was foraged on site and were printed using cyanotype – a form of image-making that is known for its minimized environmental impact as well as its historical ties to botanical documentation. To give evidence of these chemicals’ presence, I sampled the soil beneath each of the plants I documented and out of these samples made soil chroma prints, a process that records and deconstructs the components within the soil. These works explore the temporality of the chroma-developing process and connect them to the temporal nature of glyphosate. Glyphosate attempts to bridge the seen and the unseen, bringing to light important environmental issues often overlooked.