“Care and Cultivation” – collaboration with Natori Green

Care and Cultivation is a collaborative work between Natori and Courtney that highlights the angel trumpet’s and the okra plant’s intimate relationships with humans. Both plants have traveled, and in the angel’s trumpet’s case, evolved, in the hands of people who have cultivated the plant for their own express care and cultivation.

Kidnapped and enslaved Africans brought okra seeds to the Americas and cultivated them to ensure a familiar food supply. Angel’s Trumpet is thought to have been cultivated by peoples of South and Central America for beauty and medicinal purposes for so long that many species of it are considered “extinct in the wild,” evolved to no longer make seeds but to rely on humans for perpetuation via cuttings. 

Courtney recorded okra flowers blooming in early morning hours with time lapse photography to create the projections. Natori made knit panels on a vintage knitting machine, creating intentional gaps for the flowers to pass through. Courtney and Natori bundle-dyed the knits using a collection of dried and foraged Coreopsis flowers. Mercerized cotton yarn was purposely chosen for its compatibility with the coreopsis flowers during the dying process. Cotton and okra are both from the mallow family.

These artworks uphold the vegetal world as partners with the human world in the stewardship of the earth.